Doing More With Data

Handling Big Data, Getting Together in a Cloud, Real-Time Quality Control

A few years ago, Mario Ruscev was in charge of a project to wire an oil field with a state-of-the-art system giving operators multiple streams of production data from each of the wells in the field. When it was all done and time to turn it over, the field’s manager surprised him by asking: “What do we do with it?” said Ruscev, now chief technology officer at Baker Hughes.

That field was on the leading edge of a flood of fields since then that have installed sensors to constantly measure what goes on while drilling wells and producing oil, and the industry is working on answering Ruscev’s question.

“We are in a catch-up phase. It takes some time to make sense of these new sets of data, before we figure how to really use it and how to relate it to what we want to do,” Ruscev said. Without good applications for using it in decision making, “data is just data.”

This cycle is likely to follow the same path as seismic, where advances, such as the advent of 3D seismic acquisition, enormously increased the volume of data gathered. “There have been two revolutions in seismic and we’ve never been stopped by it,” Ruscev said. “It just took time to be able to produce good results from these data.”

Fast-rising computing processing power will be able to digest the big data coming in, but he said the hard part in seismic, and now in reservoir and drilling, is relating those measurements in useful ways to “what is happening to the formation.”

Ruscev told his story during a panel discussion at the SPE Digital Energy Conference and Exhibition, in March in The Woodlands, Texas, which was filled with people working on better things to do with information. The initiatives range from mining data in well logs to make better maps showing underground stresses to doing quality control checks on data as it flows in.

Much of it is built on algorithms written to apply advanced numerical analysis methods seeking insights in the numbers.

One of the exhibitors was Sekal, a fast-growing, young company that uses real-time data analysis of measurements, such as the weight of the drillstring and the downhole pressure. The point of the work is to detect small changes in drilling conditions that could lead hours later to a big problem that could halt work, said Bill Chmela, a vice president at Sekal.