American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2017 - 54

SpecialReport: Oil & Gas Computing
delayed revenue are the most that companies can hope for out of a well, while
the worst case is a complete loss. Yet,
companies typically have more than
enough data to drive better decisions.
Companies with a culture of continuous
improvement through analytics find that
integrating 3-D seismic data with completion designs improves the long-term
economics of every well drilled by increasing production and reducing the
risk associated with well design.
Production Operations
For a company to succeed in optimizing
production operations, oil and gas production data must be used on a day-today, hour-by-hour basis. Technology and
information have been lockstep with
capital expenditures for decades, but production operations and the corresponding
operating expenses largely were ignored.
The ability for companies to collect,
process and analyze production and operational data never has been easier. Oil and
gas producers can make incremental improvements that compound over the entire

productive life of a well. The omission of
real continuous improvement strategies
during production is why most leading
experts and technology innovators are particularly focused on production optimization
that uses process control automation and
preventative equipment maintenance.
Production optimization is not solely
dependent on producing more oil and gas
all the time. To truly optimize production,
companies must produce smarter with
less overhead. Efficient companies already
have introduced mobility into every aspect
of operations. Accuracy is a side effect of
manual data collected at the source using
smart devices such as tablets. However,
capturing a set of important data points
once a day by sending a field technician
is incredibly inefficient.
Utilizing devices and sensors to capture
pressures, rates and equipment control data
on high frequencies yields far more accurate
datasets, improving an engineer's ability
to make production decisions. The scarcity
of engineering knowledge increases the
time between receiving event information
and a decision's positive outcome or negative

impact. Intelligent systems must also deliver
information back to the field technician,
providing actionable information rather
than just a better means of collecting data.
According to a McKinsey & Company
report on digitizing oil and gas production,
automation and optimization will yield
the most substantial results for any upstream
company. Process control automation of
oil and gas assets has been a part of
localized production operations for decades
from the perspective of a well, facility
and platform driven by safety and maximizing output. With the limiting factors
of computing and storage infrastructure
removed, the industry can move beyond
observational analysis to continuous improvement via data models with many
input variables associated to data points
sourced outside of the production system.
Back-Office And Midstream
Back-office cost centers of oil and
gas companies will become the controllers
of innovation in the future, because they
sit in the middle of big data for the oil
and gas industry and they put a dollar

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54 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

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American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2017