Digital Oilfields Require an Ecosystem of Strong Technology Partners to Fully Leverage Power of IIoT

For those that have been following this blog over the last year and a half you will know that we have been strong believers and proponents of the value that IIoT-enabled and advanced analytic solutions can provide upstream oil and gas companies. However, one of the greatest challenges that companies operating in the oil patch, as well as in many other industries, face is that of data management and data integration. Breaking down operational silos and integrating different data types (structured, unstructured, etc.) and data standards (i.e. WITS, WITSML, PPDM, etc.) to empower employees and reduce non-productive time (NPT) has been cited more than any challenge than this Author can recall.

Recently ARC was briefed on some exciting new solutions and services being offered by a strong technology partner that possesses not only strong technical expertise in complex systems integration, machine learning and IIoT deployments, but also possesses deep domain expertise in upstream oil & gas operations. Infosys’ Oil & Gas business recently briefed ARC on some of its Digital Oilfield services, solutions and activities which were further bolstered by the acquisition of Noah Consulting, a provider of advanced information management consulting services for the oil and gas industry, in October of 2015.

Some of the more noteworthy takeaways from the briefing for the operator to consider include the following:

• Major areas of focus in terms of capabilities and expertise include equipment condition monitoring; production allocation and reporting; workflow management optimization including planning & scheduling, collaboration and knowledge management, asset management; supply chain management including enterprise content management and business process automation; real-time visualization dashboard (OISsoft, Matrikon, ISS, etc.) development, production data historian (i.e. OSI PI, Aspentech IP 21, etc.) optimization, and leveraging best of breed solutions (i.e. Sharepoint, Maximo, Quorum, etc.) to provide complete systems integration.


• Developed a rig monitoring solution, the Critical Rig Equipment Monitoring Dashboard Systems (CREMS), that helps the customer to fill “blind spots” in some of it critical rig equipment such as mud pumps, compressors and generators that may not have been instrumented in order to capture benefits that monitoring and analytics can provide. The rig monitoring solution helps to continuously monitor vital operational and performance parameters of the equipment and has the ability to monitor multiple and different types of industrial equipment at the same time on the same platform. Early detection of any alarm or fault data and acted upon in order to ensure reduced breakdown time and also extend life of the equipment in the field. Benefits included a reduction in downtime, greater operational visibility of continuous monitoring, having data backup any critical decisions rather than “gut feel”, and helped customer to minimize risk and, most importantly, saved costs.


• Infosys developed an augmented reality (AR) solution using a smartphone in order to provide assisted maintenance by augmenting various sensor information and provides real time or historical data about the machine operating conditions. The application also can be linked to digitized manuals for referring important guidelines or precautions and provides alerts about sensors breaching and configures operating thresholds that can be augmented in real-time. Benefits include access to real time information that is made easy, repairs and maintenance work can be made more quickly and correctly, and it enables technicians to make better informed decisions on-the-spot, maximize uptime and eliminate costly mistakes versus traditional manual approaches.


• Infosys developed a virtual reality (VR) solution to assist reservoir engineers with education, training, and to provide a reservoir model view and subsurface view to better understand the reservoir characteristics. With the VR application its now possible to create the same real immersive environment of a petroleum reservoir that provides more authentic learning about the reservoir and engage the learners in a way that was not possible in an actual demonstration. The VR solution creates interactive scenarios which reflect the actual subsurface view thereby providing greater visibility and more effective decision-making. Most importantly, it is a cost effective solution for training and caters to a larger audience at the one go.


• Infosys developed a Production Operation View that is designed to help operators and independent E&P firms to lower costs, reduce capital expenditure and improve operational efficiency. The solution enables monitoring of oil and gas production on a yearly or monthly basis across different wells leveraging a unified dashboard that helps in analyzing production oil and gas flow rates, current oil trends and gas/water injection rates. The dashboard also integrates the status of open or closed Health and Safety incidents in current time. Benefits include production optimization via continuous monitoring, increased profitability and reduced risk.

Owner operators, independent E&P, oilfield service providers and related stakeholders can benefit from working with strong technology partners such as Infosys and others that specialize in more complex systems integration, machine learning and advanced analytics and that can help deploy IIoT enabled solutions deployments that can help break down operational silos and ensure more complete petro-technical data integration (PTDI) across the entire upstream value chain. As I have counseled companies before, in most cases, most upstream oil and gas companies are not in the complex systems integration and IIoT and analytics business; they are in the business of finding, extracting and producing hydrocarbons at the lowest possible cost in the safest and most expeditious manner possible. ARC believes that working with strong technology partners that possess both upstream oil & gas domain expertise and more complex systems integration, IIoT and analytics expertise can prove to be a smart investment.