The digital oil field targets financial and operational excellence by integrating new and upgraded standardized infrastructure and modeling to capture, process, and protect data and intellectual property; transform workflows; enable new roles; and improve collaboration.

The operative words here are “transform” and “enable.”

The focus is the four “rights” – the right information to the right people at the right time with the right context.

Companies believe the digital oil field is a good investment. (Source: Invensys)

Benefits, functionality
Twenty years ago, technical personnel spent about 70% of their time gathering and preparing data for decision-making. Today, despite automated data gathering and historian systems, people are still spending about 70% of their time preparing data.

Why? Because they have more data to wade through! But they do not need more data – they need better context.

The first functionality of the digital oil field workflow is to automate collection, verification, and validation of the right data so theright people have it at the right time in the right context. Both generic semantic data models, such as S95 and ISO15926, and industry models such as WITSML and PRODML will be important in this phase

Secondly, model, rules-based, and heuristic technologies help preprocess and classify information and processes to handle routine issues promptly and to detect and alert on more complex issues.And as digital capability increases, reactive alerting will give way to near-real-time and forecast alerts.We must be careful, however, that time spent maintaining automated systems does not counter our gains from reducing manual data gathering. Data-collection and processing tools must include self-diagnostic elements to reduce maintenance and enhance internal integrity.

But data gathering and alerting process are just the beginning. Alerts can trigger calibrated responses based on criticality to prompt individuals or teams to analyze a situation, understand the cause, and define and initiate a response. The workflow also must capture the analysis process, the plan resolution, the actions taken, and the results achieved, helping to create best practices.

The final functionalities of the digital oil field are in its ability to learn, modify, and simplify workflows; convert human-driven steps to machine-driven steps; and continuously improve the process.

Implementation options
There are at least three approaches to implementing the digital oil field, and each has its tradeoffs.

The first rolls out digitization of individual value loops such as surveillance or flow assurance across an enterprise.While this can allow immediate returns, it also can create a series of incompatible and even competitive applications.

The second approach rolls out individual technology layers such as sensors, models, and visualization across the entire asset base. This is the most comprehensive, but defers most benefits until completion. Given the time and cost required to finish the entire implementation, however, the benefits might never be realized.

The third approach is the “vertical slice” strategy, which rolls out the entire technology solution over a representative subsection of the asset base, such as a particular field or basin. The challenge here is finding the right representative area so the technology, once proven, can be easily implemented across the enterprise.

The approach selected depends on what drives excellence and profitability in a given operation, and that begins with a diagnosis of business strategy and a look at how execution is measured.