BP’s hurricane management system mashup combines BP’s GoM asset information, Virtual Earth imagery, and WMS weather feeds to help the operator in disaster planning.

Simply defined, “Web Services” are software systems designed to support interoperable, machine-to-machine interaction over a network. They serve large numbers of upstream oil and gas companies that have a broad spectrum of data management needs and work with technologies of varying complexity. Web Services are a new breed of Web applications that enable companies to automate workflows and access information on demand from within user applications. A key benefit of Web Services is interoperability, since Web Services enable highly diverse components to exchange information over a network.

A number of examples cited here are based on IHS experience with Web Services, but many oil companies and suppliers are deploying Web Services successfully, both behind and beyond the firewall. When IHS researchers talked with E&P CIOs worldwide to determine the most critical issues facing their IT organizations, four key themes arose:

• Getting the right information to the right people at the right time;
• Handling explosive data-volume growth;
• Reducing cost and effort of managing critical, non-proprietary data; and
• Meeting demands of a changing workforce enamored with Web consumer technologies.

In upstream, the “right people” represents a diverse population from management to marketing to geologists and engineers. Often, these people are globally dispersed, but require access to information stored elsewhere. The “right information” refers to proprietary, internal data as well as trusted vendor or public information. These requirements tend to encourage greater acceptance of the Internet and Web-based business models.

Many of today’s entrenched costs are based on the assumption that employees must store and manage both proprietary and commercial data behind the corporate firewall to achieve desired levels of integration with many different applications. However, the upstream IT spend could be reduced significantly or allocated more effectively if E&P companies used modern Web technologies to remotely access and seamlessly integrate critical, but non-proprietary, data stored beyond the firewall. This capability would free already stretched IT staff to focus on managing the company’s growing volumes of proprietary data.

One of the more intriguing areas of explosive data growth and outsourced hosting is in map layers, aerial photos, and satellite images used in consumer Web-based spatial visualization tools such as Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. More people are using these technologies at home on the Internet, and as a result, expect the same technologies at work.

Generation G

Consumer technologies are rapidly altering industry behaviors. Several years ago, IHS began asking thousands of participants at energy conferences if they had used Google Earth. Three years ago, perhaps 10% had used the tool. Two years ago, the numbers had grown to 50%, and in 2007, every participant said they had used it. About half said they also use Google Earth for work. While specialized E&P applications may have more technical depth, modern consumer technologies like this tend to be far easier to use. Workers today are voluntarily learning technology at a rapid rate.

As the great crew change progresses, new recruits who have grown up with the Internet will increasingly expect to work with these familiar Web-based technologies. Within a few years, a generation of geoscientists who consider Internet-based mapping technologies standard tools will enter the workforce. A review of the birth years of current members of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists suggests that people who’ve never known a time without the web may soon join the E&P industry Web (Figure 1).

This “Generation G(oogle)” will have vastly different expectations regarding information access, availability, currency, and even spatial visualization compared with the current industry workforce. Industry technologies that blend the simplicity, immediacy, low cost, and collaborative capabilities characteristic of modern consumer applications will be the inevitable winners in coming years. As CIOs seek to meet the evolving demands of “Generation G,” it will be increasingly important to consider ways of implementing less expensive, higher-performance, user-driven, Web-based solutions.

With the Internet and Web Services, it is no longer necessary to co-locate people, data, and computing resources. They can be distributed wherever the Internet reaches. Given sufficient bandwidth, from the user’s perspective any data accessed through Web Services appears to be local, while it may reside in another hemisphere. Since all major software suppliers support Web Services, they are rapidly becoming the universal standard of communication and integration among remote resources over the Internet.

Value of Web Services

With Web Services, much of the data management effort can be eliminated through automation. Loading, replicating, or synchronizing public data internally becomes unnecessary because users can access current data on demand over the Internet directly from the vendor, which maintains the information and infrastructure. Automated updates provide users the latest information literally the moment a commercial vendor loads it to its Web Service distribution hub.

The obvious benefits of Web Services have escalated their adoption by the energy industry. An article by BP that appeared in an industry journal in 2006 said BP’s upstream IT organization made the decision to implement Web Services as the standard means of connecting disparate systems and called Web Services “the connection technology of the future.” The authors encouraged upstream vendors to begin implementing Web Services in their product lines.

At the 2007 Petroleum Network Education Conference, Carol Tessier, director of engineering and enterprise solutions for Pioneer Natural Resources, evaluated recent historical IT trends based on their relative value to vendors and oil company clients.

Technologies such as relational databases offer more value to vendors than to oil companies because of the inevitable proliferation of diverse database implementations. Corporate portals, on the other hand, offer more value to clients, primarily because many vendors cannot work well with portals.

According to Tessier, recent technologies, including Web Services, are of nearly equal high value to oil companies and vendors. Standards-based Web technologies foster tighter integration across disparate systems, enabling E&P organizations to enjoy best-of-breed solutions. And vendors benefit by providing those systems with direct access to critical business information, broadening the vendor’s content presence within the customer’s organization.

Upstream organizations are using Web Services in four major integration patterns to:
• Integrate data on demand with end-user analytical and interpretive applications;
• Automatically update corporate data management systems;
• Connect users with vital sources of information through E&P portals; and
• Merge multiple spatial data streams through online map and globe visualization tools.

Web Services can provide interpretive software with access to data over the Internet in two ways, by automating the update of underlying project databases and by accessing external data in real time from within the interpretation software.

IHS noticed a significant increase in the use of Enerdeq Web Services to access commercial well and production data once users of PETRA (a geosciences application) could directly access information from within the software (Figure 2). This Web Services connection between an analytical application’s local database and a commercial data hub keeps the dataset current without manual file transfer.

Generally, IT personnel have to manually load commercial data to corporate data repositories. This tedious process can be eliminated by connecting the data repository directly to a vendor hub where the most current data resides. Merrick Systems’ RIO corporate data repository provides a single repository for information from producing fields and reconciles and integrates data from multiple sources. To ensure the system always has the latest production information for non-operated wells, RIO incorporates a Web Services feed to a commercial data source. A nightly process automatically downloads new production data and loads it directly into RIO. When users log in each morning, they have the most current data.

Another way many companies are seeking to aggregate and integrate numerous applications and data sources is through Web-based portals. One benefit is that the user interface experience is controlled by the customers themselves; the content provider simply makes the information accessible through a standard Web Service.

Pioneer Natural Resources, for example, created a unified, map-based portal called OneMap, which provides users with many types of technical data. Pioneer leveraged Schlumberger’s DecisionPoint Web-based data access framework and IHS Enerdeq Web Services to display commercial production information alongside Pioneer’s proprietary data in a single map view. According to Tessier, it took a mere day and a half to create the report links using Web Services. “By comparison,” Tessier added, “some custom links we wrote years ago to transfer IHS data to our previous database took six or seven months to write.”

Pioneer’s OneMap is an excellent example of the power of Web Services to enable E&P portals to aggregate multiple data sources smoothly and efficiently. The two top benefits to users are that they can access all data sources with the same workflow, and they can see all available proprietary and public data in one place.

These benefits also apply to online map and globe visualization “mashups” that industry professionals are beginning to use in their daily work. Mashups are Web-based approaches that combine content or applications from more than one source into an integrated experience. While consumer globe visualization technologies such as Google Earth and Virtual Earth are not tailored to the needs of any particular industry, innovative E&P uses are appearing that use Web Services to provide access to map and spatial information as well as E&P well and production data and other asset information.

IDV Solutions, a company specializing in visual composite applications, recently developed a mashup for BP combining Virtual Earth with public Web Map Service (WMS) feeds and proprietary BP data to enable rapid disaster planning (Figure 3).

Using the system, BP can bring in live weather map data for an evolving hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) and determine which offices, fuel terminals, and other facilities may be impacted. “This solution is changing the way we do business,” said Steve Fortune, BP information management director for the GoM strategic performance unit. “When the data is presented through a map-based interface, it’s amazing. It gives you a richer, bigger, more intelligent picture of what’s going on.”

Web Services expand

Integration remains a high priority in the upstream industry.

Today, Web Services are essentially content access services. Going forward, it is likely that more fit-for-purpose Web Services will be developed. One example might be a “derived data” Web Service that performs selected calculations on raw data and delivers the result (instead of the raw data) on demand to a user. Web Services could also be extended to allow complex searches of unstructured, energy-specific content over the Internet. Schlumberger’s recent acquisition of the rights to deploy Metacarta’s spatial search technology in the oil and gas industry illustrates the importance vendors are attributing to geographic context-based search capabilities.

While Web Services offer promise to the E&P industry and its long-held desire for seamless integration between workflow applications and critical content, they are still in their infancy. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Web Services is their potential to bridge the gap between the workflow needs of today’s current aging workforce and the workers from “Generation G,” who have vastly different expectations regarding information access.