Creating the digital oil field involves adding the 21st century technologies of automation and information to the fluids-processing systems of classic petroleum production operations. Increased recovery from existing fields is a major potential benefit in this era of rising demand for oil and gas.

The vision of the digital oil field requires the successful completion of a series of complex automation projects. Automation success requires the application of the appropriate information technology and the integration of sound operations practice with controls systems engineering.

Industrial Java technology has proven to be an ideal platform for automation, with the capability to provide the sensor-to-boardroom integration demanded by the petroleum enterprise of the future. As will be illustrated below, the dream of operating a combined, automated system - encompassing the reservoir, the wells and the surface gathering system - is within reach.

Industrial Java

Industrial Java, supported by Sun Microsystems and the worldwide Java community, is an automation-solutions initiative that is now more than 8 years old. The control engineering community also viewed the Java platform as the basis for more accessible, adaptable and open automation systems.

More powerful control architectures have indeed resulted from the efforts of the Java automation companies. One of the major accomplishments of the industrial Java community is the integration of legacy devices and machines into a modern control environment. Many operations environments - such as the oil field - contain isolated orphaned devices. These are machines, sensors, actuators and even software systems that do their jobs but do not communicate to other control functions. Java-based control architectures can now integrate orphaned devices into comprehensive automation systems.

In addition to its uses in the general automation industry, industrial Java has many applications in the petroleum industry. A particular example is SmartStation architecture for petroleum retail automation. This basic architecture can help address the fluids management issues and equipment of oil field gathering systems.

Device integration

Large-scale petroleum production involves extracting fluids, oil and gas from reservoirs via well bores. In oilfield operations, the produced fluids are gathered, processed and introduced into transportation networks. Managing these operations involves collecting vast amounts of data from a large variety of devices. A first step towards the digital oil field is device integration and the automated collection of data.

Flow conditions in the wells are described by sensors for pressure, temperature and flow rate. In advanced installations these measurements are already captured via high-speed satellite networks. The gathering system is also sensor-rich: in addition to wellhead pressure and temperature, flow rates in pipe segments for gas, oil and multi-phase flows are also provided. Furthermore, there are sensors on compressors, large motors and pumps, as well as liquid-level sensors in tanks.

Unfortunately, telemetry is not automated for much of the gathering system, and operations are labor-intensive. There are instruments and measurements, but collection of the data to support automation is not in place. Consequently, data collection and some control actions are performed by human operators.

Upgrading legacy devices by replacement is prohibitively expensive. However, Java-automation companies have developed Java-based control middleware and industrial hardware to augment legacy devices so that they can participate in a modern control environment.

Benefits to the enterprise

In addition to solving the device integration problem, Java-based gateways also allow an enterprise to increase the data collected and shared with corporate systems, thus increasing the business value of devices. Using an encrypted XML messaging layer, the gateway can easily supply data to a variety of applications supporting such business functions as cost tracking, logistics, inventory, maintenance and operations. By implementing direct data feeds in a system rather than relying on human interpretation and shuffling of data, an enterprise can significantly shorten decision cycles and reduce operations labor. Ultimately, this integration of devices and automation of data collection can impact far-reaching enterprise-class applications such as enterprise resource planning. These benefits have been shown by applications integrated in the architecture.

In a more focused enterprise application, much has been written in the industry about universal dashboards and the business value of data mining. Effective dashboards will require sophisticated knowledge engineering and systems engineering to make the transition from data to useful action. However, the starting point is at the device and machine level and their integration into a control environment supported by information technology.

The oil field can derive immediate benefits from device integration. For example, a software supplier to the oil field provides a suite of applications for the capture of production data and the preparation of standard production reports. Collection of the field measurements from the appropriate instruments is done manually. Even though the data collection is partially automated via handheld wireless devices, data collection is expensive, especially when large geographic areas are involved. A project is underway to replace manual data collection with Java gateways and wireless data concentrators. While the oilfield applications are not written in the Java language, XML provides a convenient means of data integration.

Java platform

The Java language was originally introduced as an exemplar of object-oriented programming. It was anticipated that the Java language would have widespread applications in database applications and enterprise applications. Indeed that has been the case: The enterprise Java platform (J2EE) has been a standard for enterprise computing platforms.

One of the reasons for the popularity of J2EE is its security solutions. Security services are used throughout the Java-based enterprise architecture. These capabilities augment the basic security features of the Java language and object model, and they prevent the memory corruption that is the source of many viruses.

In addition to enterprise adoption, it has also been widely accepted by the control engineering community that uses the Java platform for the development and deployment of embedded controllers. The use of Java virtual machines (JVM) and Java-based CPUs give Java control applications even more reach and flexibility. The big gain for control engineers is that they get all the power of modern computer science for control system development, but they can deploy the Java applications on small, devices like Java-based PLCs.

The Java platform has a key role to play as the enabling technology for the large-scale control systems engineering effort required to realize the vision of the oil field of the future. It solves two major problems: ease of device integration and a platform for sensor-to-boardroom integration. More importantly, the Java platform supports the engineering efforts required to bridge the gap between current practice and the dreams of the digital petroleum future.