HOUSTON—When it comes successfully capitalizing on an abundance of E&P and drilling data generated in the oil patch, working in silos can lead to wasted time, duplicated efforts, tunnel vision and misdirected focus in daily operations.
One group may operate using datasets utilizing software systems that are different than the next group. A group in one field may be working to solve a problem that has already been solved elsewhere.
Other impediments— such as disagreement on terms or definitions and content of scrubbed datasets— arise when different groups come to together. Yet, in many instances, too much time is spent on accessing, organizing and integrating data instead of analyzing it to find opportunities—whether it’s cost-savings or predicting the likelihood of equipment failure. Then, there’s getting buy-in from everyone.
These were just some of the examples mentioned by Andrew Lafleur, engineering coordinator of the Mid-Continent Business Unit’s Integrated Operations Center for ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP). Speaking during the Digital Oilfields USA Summit in Houston on Dec. 9, Lafleur gave insight on how the company’s integrated operations worked to better leverage data to improve the way it does business and produce more oil and gas for the same dollars.
“Is the answer operating philosophy or is it a targeted technical solution?” he asked. “Obviously it’s a bit of both. … We are trying to get to a place where we can take action today to prevent downtime tomorrow. I’d rather engineers and field specialists work on extending run life, decreasing failure rates and getting more production out of every well that’s out there, then mining data and trying to come up with the daily to-do list.”
With integrated operations, everyone must understand the company’s overall priorities in order to set the agendas in each group, working to get to the same point, he said, noting duplication of efforts must be eliminated.
ConocoPhillips’ integrated operations philosophy is based on collaboration and aligned work processes via technology. The company has a centralized database where everyone submits and access datasets, which can be also downloaded for additional analysis.
Integrated operations sets out to enable innovators to solve the next problem, not solve the last problem again, he said, adding everyone should leverage or build upon the efforts of others. That’s when the organization’s capabilities grow, he said.
“All of the data scrubbing is directed at a common dataset,” Lafleur said, regardless of whether the data was gathered from a reservoir engineering, planning and scheduling or drilling perspective. “There is no more siloed one-off datasets that no one else has access to. The definitions are well understood, and all of the organizations can come into this one tool, click the buttons for the reports they are looking for and move on.”
Such a system could have saved Lafleur time when he was a reservoir engineer tasked with justifying whether to build a new production facility or sell an existing one in the Texas Permian. Lafleur said his predecessor had completed the same exercise, but Lafleur couldn’t find the datasets so he had to start the project again—a task that took him a month to do.
Companies should harness their data and put it into a centralized database to which everyone has access, he explained.
But he pointed out that technology and integration can be complicated; however, “once you get your solution in place it’s very easy,” Lafleur said. “Our real focus [now] is getting all the ducks in the row, herding cats, to get everybody in the same direction.”
With data integrated and spreadsheets transformed into databases, the company’s focus turned to surveillance by exception. But employees no longer have to filter through tons of production data, figure out the status of all equipment and get tank levels. “That’s coming in on telemetry,” he said, noting that data is scrubbed and a to-do list is set for the day.
ConocoPhillips makes use of daily notifications, for example, to help determine where field activities should be directed or dashboards to find out which pumping units are not operating up to par.
“We have the integration and technology piece covered. The real challenge is getting the organization to change the way they work and start using the centralized method going forward,” LaFleur said.
In September 2014, he said the center received approval for an asset management system, enabling crews to seek out optimization and cost reductions from the pore to the delivery pump.
“Fourteen months later we have a huge integrated dataset covering most disciplines in the organization,” he said, noting geologists now do geo-prognosis in an integrated data environment instead of a spreadsheet application as well as the drilling engineers. “We have a lot more information about the configuration of that hole and how it came to be that way when we go to start doing well spacing and completions, frack spacing and sizing analysis.”
Now, the company has all disciplines contributing to the work of the next person in line; whereas before the next person in line was trying to find the other person’s work or redoing it because they didn’t understand what went into that effort, he said.
“In the assets that we’ve implemented this for we’ve seen an overall efficiency gain of 20-30%,” LaFleur said. “That is 20-30% of their time that they can spend on the next innovation in run time or getting more production.”
Velda Addison can be reached at vaddison@hartenergy.com.