Between exploration, development and product, oil and gas companies are sitting on mountains of data that grow every single day.
It’s incredibly valuable information to their operations, but it’s difficult to process it all effectively to reap the full benefits.
“In the area of big data… they’ve struggled because they don’t understand the value of sharing information,” explains LNS Research’s Dan Miklovic a global strategist on the digitization of oil and gas.
“There’s been sort of a ‘this is my job, this is what I need to do it’ and they’ve had blinders on. It hasn’t been that they haven’t adopted technology, it’s just they’ve taken a very parochial approach to it.”
Miklovic was in St. John’s to guide the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technology Industries (NATI) working session to explore the opportunity in big data for the province’s oil and gas sector.
The event, sponsored by engineering consultants Hatch, brought together leaders from both the province’s technology sector and the oil and gas industry, along with some reps from academia, for the first time in an effort to break down walls and engage in a frank discussion about the collaborative sharing of information.
“When we talk about Newfoundland and Labrador, we’ve got to stop looking at things in silos,” says NATI CEO Ron Taylor.
“If we look at things and work as a community, we can realize much larger opportunities. We can stop being sub-contractors and start being primes.
“We’ve got a very strong technology community, we’ve got a very strong business community, we’ve got a very strong collaborative community and bringing all that together we should be able to create better opportunities for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.”
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Throughout the invite-only event, representatives from the oil and gas side — most of whom were top level executives from organizations such as Husky Energy, Statoil, ExxonMobil — offered candid insights.
“They’ve come to a point where they’ve realized they have great opportunities, some of those involve challenges and I think they’ve identified that a certain amount of it is beyond their ability to do it themselves,” says Taylor.
“By sharing where you want to take this, where you want to go, there’s so much talent here on this island that can facilitate and make that happen, but you’ve got to talk to each other.”
Big data is best defined as large sets of data that can be analyzed to uncover patterns and associations that can be used to drive faster, smarter and more accurate decisions that in turn create operational efficiencies. For the oil and gas industry, that might be data from seismic studies, weather mapping, maintenance reports, and human resource activities, all of which can be used to improve safety, foster the quicker discovery of resources, increase recovery rates and reduce environmental impacts.
“Information has been described as the oil that keeps the new industrial nation working. It’s as important as the lubricant and fuel behind the locomotive or the airplane,” says Miklovic.
“Information is the thing that sort of catalyzes business process improvement and, in many respects, it is the ability to use information that can determine whether or not your business is successful.”
Traditionally, data tells us what has taken place. Big data, meanwhile, offers a snapshot of what may or may not happen, depending on what actions are taken.
One speaker from an oil and gas firm spoke about how they used it to determine that running their equipment 10 per cent slower would extend the life of the field.
“They could get more yield out of the entire field by taking less out of it, but without predictive data to do that, they would never have known that,” says Taylor.
NATI doesn’t plan on resting on its laurels and studying the subject over the next couple of years before coming back to the group with something tangible.
At day’s end, the group collectively identified three priority areas to move the agenda forward: competitiveness; NATI-led collaboration within industry, associations, government, private sector and academia; and data sharing.
“How do we share data in a safe and secure way that we protect people’s privacy but at the same time we maximize the value,” says Taylor.
The intent going forward is to deliver a business plan to the group within two weeks, reconvene for more collaboration discussions in mid-March, and make big data opportunities in oil and gas and other sectors a key part of NATI’s knowledge summit this May.
Twitter: kennoliver79