April 2006 Issue 1

Shell’s smart
field vision
– and what is
holding us back

Security of
oil and gas IT
infrastructure
- a rethink needed?
Go ahead.

Break out
of the box.

But how?
How do you give your people the time to be creative?
How do you use technology in innovative ways to gain a competitive edge?
How do you improve your operations to realize game-changing results?
How do you close the workflow gaps that hinder team performance?

Visit Schlumberger Information Solutions at www.slb.com/sis_breakthrough

© 2006 Schlumberger 06-IS-104

 foreword

Welcome to the first issue of Digital Energy Journal

D
igital Energy Journal is a new monthly print magazine covering the latest news and
developments in the digital oilfield. The organisers of Intelligent Energy 2006, the Society of
Petroleum Engineers and Spearhead Exhibitions Ltd, kindly allowed us to combine the first
issue of our magazine with the catalogue of Intelligent Energy 2006, so we can draw lots of
attention to our first issue.
If you want to make sure you receive our next issue, fill out the subscriptions form on page 14 in this issue
or sign up on our website www.digitalenergyjournal.com.
We also have a free online newsletter you can sign up to.
In this issue Peter Kapteijn, smart fields program manager with Shell, presents his vision for how he thinks
the Digital Oil field will work, with sensors gathering large amounts of data about the well, computer models
trying to understand what is happening underground and suggesting how things could be changed to
improve output, and teams of geologists, geophysicists, drilling engineers and reservoir engineers working
together in defined ways to decide how best to proceed.
Whilst information technology is important in this vision, it is not entirely about information technology –
more how the technology is used, and people’s roles are managed, so the well can be operated in the most
optimum way.
Shell expects to get 8 per cent more oil out of a well, and at 10 per cent faster rate, using these methods.
To achieve this, everybody’s role, and the flow of information, will need to be finely orchestrated.
Everyone, including the modelling computers, will need the best possible information about the well, and
what everybody else is doing.
We have had technology to do all these things for several years – to the point that some people are
starting to ask why things aren’t moving faster, considering that getting an average 8 per cent more oil out of
a well is something oil companies and the general public would very much like to achieve.
We believe it would be helpful if the oil and gas industry had its own magazine about how information
technology is being best used, so people can learn from one another about the best ways to set about
achieving the smart fields vision, the obstacles encountered and how they were overcome. This is the
contribution Digital Energy Journal will make.
We have a report from Stephen Comstock, computing VP of Exxon Mobil E&P, about how he sees the
future of computers in the industry.
You can read about a project by BP to collect equipment monitoring information using tough wireless
computers; you can read about a new mobile satellite communications system which can carry up to 492
kbps anywhere in the world apart from the poles, with a terminal smaller than this page.
You can read about how Schlumberger manages its knowledge within the company, ensuring that all
company employees to have the latest company knowledge at their fingertips at all times and can quickly
get help from subject experts when they need it.
We present some of the initiatives server giant HP is bringing to the oil and gas industry and report on
Jodi, the initiative to build one global database of oil data for all of the countries of the world.
We have a comprehensive report from the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Digital and Oil and Gas
Security conference in December last year, which featured chief information officers and chief technology
officers from Total, Chevron, Shell and Occidental Energy, addressing growing concerns into the possibility
of oil and gas data, and more importantly the control systems, getting hacked into. It might need a complete
rethink about how we structure our IT security and our data.
If you like Digital Energy Journal, you could help us get started by taking out a subscription for ten issues –
only GBP 195 / Eur 300.
If you don’t want to subscribe for now, you could sign up to our free e-mail newsletter on the front page of
our website, www.digitalenergyjournal.com, and we’ll send you the best of our news regularly every week.
Please make sure we are on your company’s mailing list for relevant press releases, and if you have any
articles or case studies which could be useful to our readers then be sure to let us know. If you would like to
get involved in our magazine by contributing articles or papers yourself then we would like to hear from you.
The world is going through challenging times, as we ask ourselves hard questions about our energy
supplies – but one thing is for certain, if we are going to drill oil, then we should operate the well as
effectively as modern technology and human ability will allow.

Read about it in Digital Energy Journal.

Karl Jeffery, editor

Digital Energy Journal, London
www.digitalenergyjournal.com
jeffery@thedigitalship.com

April 2006 • digital energy journal 1


April 2006
Digital Energy Journal
213 Marsh Wall,
London, E14 9FJ, UK
Contents
Issue 1 SHELLS’s SMART FIELDS 4
Digital Energy Journal met Pieter Kapteijn, programme manager for smart
fields with Shell, to find out how he defines ‘Smart Fields’, what he expects
from the Intelligent Energy 2006 conference, where he sees the progress
and the obstacles remaining to be overcome

Editor
Karl Jeffery EXXON MOBIL’S STEPHAN COMSTOCK 8
jeffery@thedigitalship.com Stephen Comstock, vice president of E&P computing with Exxon Mobil,
Tel +44 207 510 4935 presents his views at a recent conference about how information technology
can do the most to help the oil and gas industry, and the challenges of making
Advertising and it all work
Subscription Sales
Monica Wojcik
m.wojcik@lngjournal.com
WIRELESS COMPUTERS IN OIL AND GAS 15
BP trialled using tiny wireless computers, called ‘motes’ for remote machinery
Tel +44 207 510 4936
monitoring, remote data acquisition and communication. We talk to
Crossbow Technology, which manufacturers the motes
Production
Alison Balmer

Subscriptions cost GBP 195 per year for

ten issues. Subscribe online at
www.digitalenergyjournal.com.
We have a free bi-weekly e-mail
newsletter subscribe online
www.digitalenergyjournal.com
We have a free online news service see
www.digitalenergyjournal.com.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AT SCHLUMBERGER 20
Schlumberger has been addressing knowledge management issues since
1997, and now has possibly the most advanced knowledge management
system in the world – it even has employees specifically employed to help
out their colleagues. We took a look at the system
PARAS CONSULTING 22
Hamish Wilson, managing director of Paras Consulting presents his own
ideas about how oil and gas companies could improve their data structuring
– by aligning the data with the decisions which are made using it

Many thanks to the Society of Petroleum

Engineers and Spearhead Exhibitions for
allowing us to launch our first issue at
Intelligent Energy 2006, linking our
magazine with the official event catalogue.
JOINT OIL DATA INITATIVE 24
A look at JODI (Joint Oil Data Initiative), a United Nations led initiative to
improve the quality and availability of information about oil and gas flows
from countries around the world

DIGITAL OIL AND GAS SECURITY 26

Digital Energy Journal attends SPE’s two day conference on oil and gas
IT security, featuring CIOs and CTOs from Shell, Chevron, Occidental,
Total and others, presenting their views about how the security of IT infrastructure
could be strengthened

HP’s PERSPECTIVE 32
Digital Energy Journal spoke to Paul Helm, upstream manager oil and gas, HP
about the software and hardware he believes could help the oil and gas
industry, drawing from HP’s experience in other sectors

April 2006 Issue 1

Shell’s smart
field vision
– and what is
holding us back

Security of
oil and gas IT
infrastructure
- a rethink needed?

Front cover photo design

courtesy Schlumberger

April 2006 • digital energy journal 3

 What are
‘SMART FIELDS’?
S
Digital Energy Journal
interviewed Pieter
Kapteijn, Smart Fields
Programme Manager with
Shell International
Exploration and
Production, also chair of
the programme committee
for the Intelligent Energy
2006 event, about Shell’s
approach to ‘smart fields’
and what he expects from
Intelligent Energy 2006
4 digital energy journal • April 2006
hell estimated three years ago that
‘smart’ fields could have 8 per cent
higher ultimate oil recovery and 10 per
cent increase in the rate of recovery
over traditional oil fields. Shell still believes that
this estimate is reasonable.
But another question that is starting to emerge,
is why isn’t the progress moving more quickly?
This is one of the questions Mr Kapteijn hopes
will be answered in the Intelligent Energy 2006
event, with a session titled “stop procrastinating,
start acting.”
“We want the industry to take this step, one
could even say ‘leap’ – and find out what is
keeping us where we are today – why can’t we
get these intelligent systems implemented faster,”
Mr Kapteijn says. “We want to make the whole
idea of ‘smartness’ really happen.”
The necessary technology – sensors,
communications, software and automation – has
been well understood for some time.
To get most value from a ‘smart field’,
personnel may have to change their
traditional roles and definitions of
what those roles mean
(‘geologist,’ ‘engineer’) and
many different vendors have
to ensure their products
work well together.
Shell is keen to
encourage people to
understand how these
systems are put
together, to make the
most out of the
information that we
can now obtain, and
look at the specific
obstacles and how to
overcome them.
“Smartness is
applying appropriate
levels of intelligence to
your business,” he says. “It’s
really technology driven business
improvement.”
“Data gathering in isolation doesn’t
give you any value,” he says. “Decision
support systems in isolation don’t give you any
value. We have to get people to understand
the importance of integrating the system and
effectively connecting the data to the decisions.”
“Our program distinguishes itself from our
competitors in that we spend a lot of time
developing the intellectual and technical
framework.”
Pieter Kapteijn, Smart Fields Programme Manager
with Shell International Exploration and Production
“It’s more than just technology. It’s thinking
about how we use it. We’re reaching a phase
when technology is not enough, nor is IT.”
“The implications of doing this go way
beyond doing things better,” he says. “It’s doing
things differently. Our mission is that in 5-10
years time we will be able to remotely operate
our producing assets, connect and support them
globally, and optimise them for lifecycle value,
24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Shell sees this as nothing less than a “new
paradigm” or “reinvention of the business.”
The idea for the Intelligent Energy 2006
conference evolved at a Society of Petroleum
Engineers (SPE) event in mid 2002 which Mr
Kapteijn chaired, held in France.
“I think the industry needs to come together. It’s
a great time to bring people together, particularly
young staff. A lot of people are coming. A lot of
people have been working on this. At the
Intelligent Energy conference, Shell will have a
booth and we’ll invite all our partners, who are
helping us develop Smart Fields.”
“The challenges the industry faces are so
enormous. The easy oil is gone: we now have to
pull together all our experience and intellect to
deliver the oil- and gas the world needs.
Intelligent Energy 2006 will show people how
this could be done. It is an exciting time to be in
this business or to join it.”
Computer model
The essence of the Shell ‘smart field’ idea, it
could be said, is model-based optimisation.

The key is the computer model, which
represents, or models, our best understanding of
how the reservoir is actually behaving, so it can
work out what changes could be made to the
various settings to optimise an outcome, i.e.
production or recovery.
Data is fed into the computer model from all
the field sensors, logging equipment and
flowrate measuring equipment fitted to the wells
and facilities.
The computer model improves over time, by
comparing the anticipated readings with the
actual readings, and using (real-time) information
to continuously update the model.
Ultimately, engineers will be able to use the
model to accurately predict what will happen if
they make certain changes – for example if they
change the flow of gas into a well, how it will
change the oil production (changes in “gas lift”
rates or well designs).
“The asset model represents your best
understanding of what the asset is supposed to
do,” says Mr Kapteijn.
“Your model is never perfect. The model tells
you, what I can do with the asset. Then you
perfect the model on the basis of the results.”
By trying out thousands of different possibilities
(“iterative approach”), the computer can work out
the optimum settings of the things which operators
can control (eg opening and closing valves) to
get the best outcome over the lifetime of the well
and, what is very important, taking into account
the uncertainties in the reservoir.
All this can happen very quickly rather than the
current several week-long procedure for looking
at well data.
This is quite different from the traditional oil
well, which some observers describe as nothing
more than a hole with some plumbing attached,
which is operated until the oil stops flowing or
when the water breaks through.
“When we have problems in the field,
normally we ask a logging company like
Schlumberger to take and interpret a well
production log,” says Mr Kapteijn.
“The data goes back to the reservoir
engineer at Shell, who says, I don’t understand
this, it doesn’t fit with my model. It takes time to
update the model and understand what’s really
going on.”
“With smart technology, we can turn around a
decision in one tenth of the time. We can
automatically update the system model within a
few hours.”
Modelling oil wells becomes much more
powerful when it can be used over all the wells
on a reservoir, or even all the oil wells an oil
company has, and when the predicted
performance spans the entire lifecycle of the well.
Indeed, Shell stresses that with a system like
this it is important to look at the whole well or
field over its entire lifecycle, to get maximum
value out of it in an integrated way.
Over time, new ways to optimise things
emerge; for example, things can be done
differently in the appraisal phase which impact
the amount of oil which can be produced from
Worker using telephone in the control room of the gas treatment facility, BLNG Liquefaction plant at
Lumut, Seria, Brunei
the field over its lifetime.
The computer model could also determine if
the amount of water being pumped into the well
to maintain reservoir pressure is increasing the
short term flow rate at the expense of ultimate
recovery, clearly a scenario to be avoided.
This modelling and rapid iterative approach is
the best way anyone has come up with for
handling the uncertainty about what is going on
underground, because over time, the model
reflects what is going on underground more and
more closely (and uncertainty reduces).
No-one is ever completely certain about what
is happening underground, they can only use
tools to improve their guesses. But smart field
technology can help improve the confidence with
which people make decisions.
“The only way to manage subsurface
uncertainty is by modelling, simulation and
intense iteration,” he says.
There are two types of models, static
(describing what is actually underground) and
dynamic (predicting the flow of fluids).
The models can be used to determine the initial
control settings and how the well should be
designed, and how much oil and gas is
expected. Then when the oil production starts, the
actual results are fed back into the model, which
can then be adjusted to better reflect reality.
Working with the model:
decision support
If (as is inevitable) the technologist with
30 years experience disagrees with the
computer’s suggestion, the human being will
have the final say.
But the computer will be able to ask why they
made that decision, and incorporate that
reasoning into the model.
If, at some future date, the experienced human
April 2006 • digital energy journal
Credit: Shell Photographic Services/Royal Dutch Shell
suggests a different course of action to remedy a
similar problem, the computer can point this out,
and ask what is fundamentally different this time.
It may be that the technologist has valid
reasons for choosing the different course of
action, and if so, this can be incorporated into
the data that supports model.
It may be that the human operator chooses
different actions on different days and is
inconsistent (as many of us are). In this case the
computer can point this out too, and the operator
can take this information into account and
perhaps alter their decision accordingly.
“We’re asking – on what information did you
decide that, what makes you say this,” he says.
“The next day, we ask, now what has changed
and what can be learned from that?”
There will be times when people strongly
disagree with the suggestions that a simulation
model makes, and times when they will be right.
Modern production systems are too complex
however, to allow operators to work with ‘gut
feel’. Sometimes an optimum control strategy is
counter-intuitive. The systems are there to support
the operator or engineer, and both staff and
systems will learn from that.
“Computers are good at logical thinking, and
humans are better at interpretation,” he says. “The
human brain is very good at interpreting patterns.”
“Traditional geology remains very important,”
he says. “Geologists interpreted something, but
there could be a difference between the
interpretations of different geologists. It was
difficult to capture how they reached those
decisions. We are trying to track more accurately
the way people arrive at an interpretation.”
The ‘smart fields’ system requires that they all
understand each other’s jobs, share each other’s
data and models, and work together to make
joint decisions, no easy task.
“We are asking people to fundamentally
understand the whole system,” he says. “They
have to understand each other. Geologists have
5
 Credit: Shell Photographic Services/Royal Dutch Shell
to understand geophysicists. Reservoir engineers
must understand production staff, and engineering
staff have to understand well engineering.” This is
how effective integration works.

Engineer shortage
As well as enabling Shell to operate its wells
more efficiently, the ‘smart fields’ program is
seen as a way to tackle the shortage of
petrochemical engineers, tackling the problem
on four fronts.
Firstly the knowledge of retiring employees is
better captured into the smart systems, so the
company can keep it after they have done.
Secondly the technology enables decisions to
be made by a smaller number of decision
makers, operating at a higher level, so fewer
highly trained engineers are needed.
“We want to make the engineers more
productive,” he says. “Operators become
optimisation engineers. Geophysicists may well
become geophysical surveillance engineers.
Geophysicists never saw themselves as being
involved in running a field in an operational
sense– this will change. We’ll get a new breed
of engineers.”
Thirdly, the Smart Fields technology makes
working in the oil and gas industry more
appealing to young graduates, who prefer the
idea of learning, working and making decisions
with computers.
“We are not the best salesmen of the
attractiveness of the oil industry,” Mr Kapteijn
says. “These tools make the business a much
more exciting place to work.”
Fourthly ‘smart fields’ mean that the specialist
decision making can be handled by fewer
dedicated people, who do not need to be
physically located next to the well. Most of the
data collection and adjustment of valves can
now be done automatically.
Top: Scene inside the control room of the gas treatment facility, BLNG Liquefaction plant at Lumut, Seria, Brunei
Shell can employ skilled personnel where they
Bottom left: Shell employees in a meeting at the Real Time Operating Center RTOC which has the capacity to
most want to work, are most available, or monitor real time data from 9 wells being drilled. USA
available for the least cost, rather than on a Bottom right: Employees operate computer equipment in the OP-2 ethylene plant control room at Deer Park. USA
remote offshore production platform.
“We have many oil fields where people go platform, and reduce the production of well, taking data about temperature and
and operate valves,” he says. “Why not unwanted production water pressure. There are also reservoir imaging tools
automate all this stuff – and move people to the There is also a possibility that ‘smart’ (seismic / resistivity) and tools for measuring
more important and interesting tasks.” technology can increase risk, by advising a liquid and gas flow rates.
course of action which any experienced human All of the downhole valves can be automated,
Improving safety operator would never advise on. But this risk so no human being has to turn them, and no-one
should be mitigated by giving the human has to go to the well head to turn them. Robotic
Shell does not believe that Smart Fields will operator ultimate control. tools can also be used.
reduce the initial risk of exploration and “High degrees of automation carry risk in their All the operators can essentially do to regulate
production (because you still have to drill holes own right,” he says. Careful design and clear the reservoir is turn valves, adjusting the rate in
to find out if there is enough oil somewhere to decision authorities are required. which oil is leaving the reservoir, and adjusting
justify a full scale operation). the rate at which water and gas is pumped in, if
However once the hole has been drilled, the Well technology it is being used for lifting the oil.
level of risk drops much more quickly, because Technologies are being considered which can
you get better information about it much faster. Fitting the technology to the oil field is separate oil, gas and water down the well,
This means that less money is lost through being comparatively easy, it could be said, compared rather than bringing it to the surface to separate
invested in the wrong operation or decision. to the human challenges. and then pumping it back in again to be used for
There are also opportunities for safety to be All the necessary sensors, logging devices, lift, such as mini-cyclones.
increased and environmental impact to be automated valves and communications equipment Gas can be taken out from one part of the
reduced; for example, it makes it possible to are readily available. well and re-injected in another, without taking it to
reduce the number of personnel on the well or Sensors can be fitted every few feet down the the surface.

6 digital energy journal • April 2006


Shell’s smart fields
Shell has 12 target Fields it wants to make
completely ‘smart’ by 2009.
Fields using this technology includes Shell’s South
Furious field in Malaysia, which has four remotely
operated wells, with 350,000 pieces of data
delivered a day. Operators use the information to
open and close valves and adjust the flow of gas
into the wells to help get the oil out (gas lift).
In another project in Brunei, the oil is in a very
thin ‘oil rim’, with many different zones with
different characteristics.
The zones are not big enough to have a
dedicated well in each zone; but it possible to
just have one well for all of the zones, if the well
is ‘smart’ and has interval control valves for each
zone. Zones that ‘misbehave’ can be controlled
in this way, before they destroy the performance
of the other zones or the well.
Shell is making the whole field “smart” and
manages the opening and closing of valves to
optimise the flow of gas, water and oil. Ultimate
recovery has increased considerably on an
individual well basis.
Shell also used smart technology to change a
3 year old oil well so it is used both as a gas
injector and an oil producer.
The Na Kika deepwater well in the Gulf of
Mexico had 6 small / medium individual fields,
which were too small to act as standalone
projects, and there was a serious sand
production problem.
The “smart system” was able to choke
individual zones, so it wasn’t necessary to raise
and lower the well equipment to do this (with a
charge of $5m to $7m for each re-entry). The
“smart” sensor equipment and ‘plumbing’ cost just
an additional $3m on each well.
Shell will always retain ownership of its data
and models, and the proprietary technology it
contributes.
“The role of an oil company is understanding
lifecycle oil field design,” he says. “We want to
excel in designing the next generation oil and
gas fields”
“Can we agree on a single IT architecture to
support all this?” he asks. “Well, that is what we
are attempting to do with our partners”.
Learning from other industries
Shell spent some time looking at other
industries, such as aerospace, banking and
pharmaceuticals, to see how much it could learn
from them about how it could use IT to work
better.
“When we look at other industries, we found
there were things we could adjust, and things we
could adopt,” he says.
Mr Kapteijn is keen to make parallels between
how he thinks smart fields should work and how
modern car engines work or are diagnosed.
Shell sees a ‘smart field’ similar to the way
modern car engines are tuned, plugging them
into a computer diagnostic system, which
communicates with numerous sensors on the
engine.
The computer system models how the engine
is behaving from the sensor readings, and
works out what adjustments are needed to
achieve optimum tuning according to the model;
the car then automatically makes these
adjustments, or a mechanic can make them later
with pinpoint accuracy and no guesswork. In
this way, the fuel economy can be improved
and emissions can be minimized.
The computer model can also be continually
updated or improved; if the engine is functioning
in a different way to how the computer calculates
it ought to be functioning, based on the readings
it is taking.
Thus the computer model of the individual car
and the total group of cars connected to the
centre, get better and better at predicting how an
engine will behave and what specific adjustments
need to be made to improve it, or how a design
should be alerted.
“Formula 1 cars for example, are fitted with
sensors to record all the different characteristics of
the track it races on. Then it sets up the car for
maximum performance,” he says. “Some of the top
teams have more IT people than mechanics.” Q

Oil major and its service suppliers

One of the largest challenges with the smart
fields concept is getting many companies to work
together, and ensure their products work together.
“Shell has a clear approach: we believe
smartness is difficult to develop and achieve as a
single company,” he says. “Some things have to
come together. Our approach is very much a
partnering approach.”
“There’s not a chance a single oil company
can do this. You want to collect the best of the
providers.”
Shell is already talking to some of the world’s
largest IT and automation companies, including
IBM, Microsoft and Invensys, on its projects. It as
already worked closely with IBM and IAC on
developing pattern recognition systems.
Shell agrees that it cannot do everything itself,
it will need to work with many vendors. Vendors
put their energy into developing their own
technology and selling it.
But are vendors motivated to sit down with
each other and make sure their products work
well together? Not, generally, unless stimulated
by the customer.

April 2006 • digital energy journal 7

 IT is about
managing data, says
ExxonMobil’s E+P
computing VP
S
tephen Comstock, vice president of
computing E&P with Exxon Mobil, says
that information technology is about
managing data, not the data itself.
It makes no sense to think of IT as a disparate
business unit, he says, because IT is involved in
everything Exxon Mobil does; more logical to
say that the business unit creates and owns the
data, and IT department manages it.
“Best practise is where the business owns the
data and the IT department manages it,” he
said. “Business units should be data experts,
not data technicians.”
“IT is part of the business,” he said. “There is
no business that it doesn’t touch.
If the server goes down, people go home.”
Stephen Comstock was speaking at a recent
oil and gas information technology conference.
To illustrate how tough he thought information
technology was, Mr Comstock told a joke
about a person being granted one wish by
God, and asking for a bridge to be built from
the US to Hawaii so it was possible to drive
there.
God said that building a bridge would be
very difficult because of the deep water, natural
resources and labour which would be involved,
and asked for an easier wish.
The person then requested an IT system which
worked. The punchline to the joke was “Do you
want two lanes or four on that bridge.”
An IT system which works, according to Mr
Comstock, was one where he has “data where
I want it – with no IDs, passwords and
junkmail.”
IT managers around the world can take heart
if the man shortly to become Exxon’s upstream
CIO believes that IT is so difficult.
“Moving data around is hard, grungy work,
but it’s got to be done. The IT technicians should
take care of it,” he said.
Exxon has put together what it considers a
“best of breed” mix of the available IT products
and management processes.
8 digital energy journal • April 2006
happens to historical data. “Data not taken care
of properly will go to hell,” he said. “Left
unmanaged, data has entropy – its value
disappears over time. You need data
management practises.”
Data security has to be addressed – who can
touch which data.
Mr Comstock said data is treated in different
ways, depending on its value. At the bottom of
the pyramid is what Exxon considers
“commodity data” – often public data, often
high volume. Less security is needed, and the
data can be managed by a third party.
More critical data is managed in-house,
“Good IT management encrypted and with strict rules about who can
access it.
involves good Ordered data can be described as
information, he said. Once it is used, it
governance. Staff have becomes knowledge, which leads to wisdom.
It is the role of the IT department to provide
to keep their data on the the order to the data.
The exploration business unit of an oil
network rather than on company needs knowledge. The requirements of
the development unit are more towards the
their hard drives. You information level of the hierarchy. The
need clear and production department have requirements lower
down the hierarchy, often just raw data.
accountable data The important thing is establishing common
standards and language, and making sure
ownership models “ people take the right approach to data
management, he said. “I’m a major proponent
Stephen Comstock, vice president of E&P of data standards.”
As a result, users will be able to access the
right data faster, and things will integrate much
better, and data quality will be higher. Users will
not have to spend as much time as they
currently do gluing and pasting together
different data sources.
“Good IT management involves good “Data standards and a common vocabulary
governance,” he said. “Staff have to keep their is the key to maximising the value of IT,” he
data on the network rather than on their hard said.
drives. You need clear and accountable data “IT needs to be strategically aligned with the
ownership models.” business,” he said. “Don’t be geeks in our own
There have to be procedures about what back office.” Q
 reservoir

Agilent Technologies introduces fibre temperature sensing system

Agilent Technologies of
California has launched
what it claims to be the
most reliable fibre-based
distributed temperature
sensing system in the
world. The system can
monitor temperature over
distances of up to 8km,
with a spatial resolution of
under 1m and a
temperature resolution of
under 0.1 C / 0.2 F.
Agilent believes that the system will
be useful for oil and gas
producers, which can use the
temperature information to monitor
and optimise production, and
detect leaks / fires in cable trays
and tunnels.
Oil and gas companies can
permanently monitor the
temperatures in oil wells, to monitor
production, with a view to finding
ways to increase production.
The system has a special “code
correlation technique” to achieve
higher accuracy, reduce power
consumption and increase the
instrument’s lifetime, Agilent says.
“We have tested the Agilent DTS
unit in a special hazardous
application and are very
impressed,” says Dr. Stephan
Grosswig, CEO at the Company
Agilent Technologies introduces fibre
temperature sensing system on
automation news
for Sensors, Geotechnical
Environmental Protection and
Mathematical Modelling (GESO),
a provider of distributed
temperature sensing applications.
“Through the combination of the
Distributed Temperature Sensing
(DTS) data and geothermal
gradient, a deep insight into the
well behaviour is generated, which
allows operators to analyze the
flow volume and changes per
section,” Agilent says. The system
can also be used to monitor high
power cables, detecting hot spots.
Pricing information can be retrieved
at +1 800 829 4444, item
number 8037.
J More information about the
Agilent N4385A and N4386A
DTS is available at
www.agilent.com/find/dts. Q

BP uses Schlumberger new scanner range

Schlumberger has “At Schlumberger, we says Steve Williams, formation
wireless seismic launched a new range of
measurement scanners for
continually test the limits of existing
technology, in an effort to respond
evaluation advisor, Hydro.
“We are also actively pursuing

acquisition well bores, called the

Input/Output Inc has
announced that BP will be
employing and testing its
new FireFly wireless
seismic acquisition system
in its Wamsutter gas field,
Wyoming. This is the first
commercial application of
the system.
Because the system uses wireless
data communications, it shows
improvements in weight,
operational productivity, I/O
claims.
BP will deploy the technology as
part of a $120m technology field
trial program. It recently announced
a $2.2bn expansion of the field.
“We are excited about the
opportunity to test this seismic
acquisition technology because it
potentially provides a way for us to
significantly improve resolution and
characterization of target reservoirs
while minimizing impact on the
environment and mitigating risks
associated with seismic field
operations,” says BP.
The first data acquisition using
the system will start in the fourth
quarter of this year. BP and I/O
will also work with other oil and
gas companies to test the system in
other places of the world. Q
“Scanner” family. It
to the technical and economic
challenges of complex reservoirs
this technology to improve our
geomechanical understanding in
includes a Sonic Scanner and extreme environments,” says many of our difficult-to-drill
for acoustic (sound) Schlumberger. formations.”
scanning; the RJ Scanner The Sonic Scanner uses the The RT Scanner can evaluate
(a triaxial induction tool) latest acoustic measurement tools, the vertical and horizontal
and a magnetic resonance making measurements in different electrical resistivity around the
logging tool MR Scanner. directions. It has already been well bore in three dimensions.
used by Hydro of Norway in the The MR Scanner takes nuclear
Using the tool, drillers can get more North Sea. magnetic resonance
radial measurements at the same “Hydro has recently used the measurements. For additional
time, so they can build up 3 Sonic Scanner tool to provide information on the Scanner
dimensional pictures at extreme good quality sonic data in a very family of rock and fluid
depths, so the users can get a slow formation where no other characterization services, see
better understanding of the reservoir. sonic could have achieved results,” www.slb.com/understand Q
Roxar sand detectors Schlumberger
to Alaska launches cement
Roxar, a Norwegian company which makes
systems to monitor reservoir performance, has scanner service
announced a deal to sell 22 acoustic sand detectors
to an (unnamed) Alaskan oil and gas operator, for Schlumberger has launched its
use in one of its natural gas fields in Alaska. “Isolation Scanner” cement
evaluation service, which analyses
The system can operate at temperatures of -40 C, and cement in a well using pulse-echo
systems are already operating in similar conditions in and ultrasonic techniques, to make
Norway, Alaska and Canada. sure it fills the hole properly.
It has a sensor which can detect the noise of sand It can be used for evaluation of traditional,
particles against the inside of the pipe. The system can filter heavyweight and latest generation lightweight
out noise generated by liquid flow and the piping structure. and foam cements. It can identify if there are
It is important that oil and gas companies detect sand as any channels in the cement and provide
soon as possible because it can clog systems up, damage information about corrosion, drilling induced
valves and equipment, and make it hard to access wells. Q wear and contamination. Q

April 2006 • digital energy journal 9

 reservoir
Ghawar Kadme and TNO put Dutch geoscientific data online
modelling tool
available
commercially
Earth Decision Sciences of
Houston, together with
Aramco Overseas
Company, has
commercially launched
GeoMorph, an earth
modelling and
geosteering tool,
originally developed by
Saudi Aramco for use on
its Ghawar oil field, the
largest in the world.
Geosteering is horizontal drilling
where the drillbit is steered so
that it goes through particular
zones of interest, using available
geologic information.
The GeoMorph picks up well
log data and updates its models
of the structural and stratigraphic
attributes of the rock immediately.
“GeoMorph has been proven
to dramatically shorten rig
downtime by enabling models to
be re-interpreted in minutes and
hours, rather than days and
weeks,” says Earth Decision.
“With GeoMorph, drilling
plans are easily updated and
adjusted, providing the flexibility
so critical to field development.”
“In complex geological
settings, adjusting the direction of
the drill bit in real time with an
‘on the-spot’ roadmap can make
or break the success of a well,”
says said Roger Sung,
geosteering and modelling
specialist and inventor of
GeoMorph at Saudi Aramco.
The tool will be supplied as
part of Earth Decision’s GOCAD
software suite (acronym
explanation not supplied), which
the company claims is the
‘industry’s leading structural 3D
modelling tool’
Earth Decision also recently
announced that it has opened a
training centre in its Houston
office with seven HP workstations
with high performance graphics
cards and large monitors, which
can be used to train students in
how to use the modelling
software. Q
10 digital energy journal • April 2006
Norwegian company Kadme, which
provides consulting and software to oil
software, which enables the data to be delivered over the
web.
industry E&P, has set up a joint venture
company with TNO Earth Resources
DINO is a system developed by TNO to manage and
store geoscientific data about natural resources in the
[Netherlands Institute of Applied Netherlands, including groundwater levels, soil drilling
Geoscience TNO] called “Lerya”, to put
Dutch natural resources information online.
tests, electrical measurements and the results of geological,
geochemical and geomechanical sample analyses.
DNO was asked to develop the DINO system by the
Lerya integrates together the DINO database of Dutch Dutch Government; under Dutch law, E&P companies are
geoscientific information, developed by TNO, with Kadme required to submit their data to the system. Q
Roxar opens training centre in Venezuela
Stavanger company Roxar, Training programs focus on the
which provides tools for reasons for building quality reservoir
reservoir modelling and models and the software skills
simulation, has opened a needed to achieve them.
new software training centre The training also covers new
in Puerto La Cruz, software modules RMSfaultseal,
Venezuela, in response to which analyses fault zone properties
local demand for Roxar’s within the reservoir model, and
reservoir modelling and FracPerm which enables geologists
simulation products. and reservoir engineers to
incorporate the effects of fractures in
This is Roxar’s first software training their modelling and simulation
centre in South America. Training will activities.
be provided in Spanish and English. Roxar has two offices in Roxar’s Venezuelan training centre
It will provide technical support Venezuela, located in Maracaibo
and training to all of Roxar’s and Puerto La Cruz, and a growing Argentina’s largest oil company. BP,
software, to geologists, reservoir customer base in South America. Chevron and Conoco-Phillips are
engineers, geophysicists and drilling Customers include Petróleos de also clients, all of whom have major
engineers. Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), Venezuela’s operations in South America.
Roxar’s philosophy is to encourage national oil company; Ecopetrol Altogether, Roxar provides
the integration of the different (Empresa Columbiana de Petroleos), software for reservoir mapping,
disciplines, so everyone can work Colombia’s state oil company; modelling, flow simulation, well
together to get the most out of the Petrobras (Petroleo Brasileiro), Brazil’s planning and workflow
reservoir. state oil company; and Repsol YPF, management. Q
Object Reservoir appoints Adam Farris VP
Object Reservoir, a Houston reservoir characterisation company, has appointed Adam Farris
as VP technology adoption, leading software development and training teams.
Mr Farris was previously accounts general manager with Object Reservoir, and before that account leader with
Landmark Graphics, managing its worldwide software and consulting services.
Object Reservoir develops software tools to deliver knowledge about reservoirs to executives in the oil and
gas industry, to improve decision making and asset management. Q
Geomodeling new software version
Geomodeling Technology impacts reservoir level to be encapsulated on a
Corp, which makes performance. larger level, considering the
geoscience software for the impact of small scale geological
oil and gas industry, has The version 4 has multi-phase details and all of the processes
launched version 4 of its upscaling, default saturation involved in fluid flow through
SBED software for functions and project template lists. sedimentary rocks. This is
modelling small scale Multi-phase upscaling allows necessary to understand
geological heterogeneity in the fundamentals of reservoir contaminant migration and
a reservoir, and how it physical composition on one estimate production. Q
 reservoir

Rock Solid Images uses OpenSpirit data integration

Houston company Rock Solid Images,
which uses rock physics to integrate
and calibrate seismic and borehole
data, has licensed the OpenSpirit
data integration system so its
customers can connect with other
software applications and data
stores.
Rock Solid Images produces iMOSS, a
technology for interpreting and modelling
seismic amplitudes, based on rock physics. It
can be used in 4 dimensional seismic analysis
(where time is included as well as the rest of
the data), and other types of analysis.
The idea is to link together quantifiable
aspects of the rock with seismic characteristics,
which are more interpretive.
By using iMOSS together with OpenSpirit,
geoscientists will find it much easier to link
together different data analysis softwares to get
the most out of the data they have, the
company believes.
OpenSpirit enables different applications to
read from different data stores, also updating iMOSS uses rock physics as the basis of interpreting
and deleting the data as required. Q and modelling seismic amplitudes

GX imaging Roxar agreement with Norway Computing Centre

system for salt Norwegian Reservoir
modelling specialist Roxar Image from
Roxar’s reservoir
GX Technology has put its has continued its working modelling
Reverse Time Migration relationship with Norwegian software

Technology (RTM) algorithm Computing Centre’s Statistical

on the market. The
algorithm can improve
imaging in areas with
complex salt conditions,
which create serious
challenges for imaging oil
and gas reservoirs.
Areas where salt is a problem
include the Gulf of Mexico, West
Africa and the Coast of Brazil.
GXT already has its first commercial
contracts to implement RTM. Q
Shell to use
Modviz platform
Shell’s Exploration and
Production Division in
Houston has decided to use
ModViz’s Virtual Graphic
Platform (VGP) for its three
dimensional data
interpretation system.
The software allows Shell to use lots
of graphic processors in the same
workstation or cluster of workstations.
“The seismic interpretation
requirements of geophysicists,
coupled with the financial impact
of quality decisions and often very
short cycle times, produce some of
the most demanding 3D
visualization needs in any industry,”
says ModViz. “We enable
application users to interact with
much larger 3D data sets than ever
before, without the need for data
pre-processing or simplification.” Q
Analysis of Natural
Resources Data (SAND)
department, signing a
further 3 year contract.
The two organisations have worked
together for 15 years.
Under the agreement, the Centre
will continue to ‘direct’ its research
into reservoir modelling and
simulation towards Roxar’s modelling
software, and Roxar has agreed a
minimum volume of research
contracts.
Roxar wants to maintain its position
as the leading provider of reservoir
modelling software.
Roxar describes its software as
‘stochastic’, referring to the way it
builds reservoir models taking into
consideration the lack of complete
VCs buy Roxar
Venture capitalist Arcapita,
part of Bahrain investment
firm Arcapita Bank, has
acquired Norwegian
reservoir modelling
company Roxar for
$200m. Royal Bank of
Scotland and Barclays
bank provided $91m of the
financing with a further
$25m working capital.
Roxar’s senior management team
will retain 1.2 per cent
shareholding.
Roxar produces tools for most of
the world’s largest oil companies
information about how the reservoir is
behaving, and the inability to
determine completely accurately what
is going to happen next based on
the information you have about what
is currently happening.
The reservoir collects all the
information from the different sensors,
along with well and seismic data,
including Saudi Aramco,
ExxonMobil, BP, Norsk Hydro,
PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela
S.A.), Petronas, ConocoPhilips,
Shell and Statoil.
“Roxar is a clear technology
leader in the products and services
it provides to the oil and gas
industry around the world,”
Arcapita says.
“We see substantial growth
opportunities as oil operators
embrace new ways of maximizing
their returns from oil and gas
reservoirs and implement reservoir
management techniques earlier in
the production cycle.”
which is fed into the computer model
and used to gradually improve the
understanding of the reservoir.
We want to ensure “that we can
describe with ever greater accuracy
the structural, lithological and the
petrophysical characteristics of the
reservoir and the uncertainty
associated with it,” says Roxar. Q
“With its market-leading
position, proprietary technology
and strong international
management team, we believe
Roxar is well positioned to take
advantage of this growing trend.”
“The fundamentals for our
markets - particularly in the areas of
sub-sea, multiphase metering and
3D reservoir modelling - have
never been stronger and continue
to improve further,” says Roxar.
“The ownership by Arcapita
gives us the support of a
formidable financial partner that
will help us develop our
competitive position.” Q

April 2006 • digital energy journal 11

 reservoir

New software from Digital Oilfield

US / Canadian company
Digital Oilfield has
launched
ProjectAccelerator, an
online tool to co-ordinate
the details of drilling
programs.
The software enables people
working a particular project in oil
and gas exploration and production
to access all critical project
information from one place.
People can share schedule
information, technical requirements,
and track project status, task
assignment / completion.
The system can be used from
initial exploration to production
stages, or can be just used for
particular stages within the
lifecycle.
There is functionality to draw
graphs to visualise how well things
are going (progress) and how
much resources have been used. A
graphical view of all phases of the
project can be shown.
The aim is to help different
companies involved in a project to
work better together and compress
the time taken for communications.
Companies can also formulise
processes that have previously
been done on an ad hoc basis or
hard to track and manage.
All parties involved can be
notified of any change, so
everyone has a better idea about
what is going on. This should lead
to fewer missed deadlines and
lower costs, the company believes.
Digital Oilfield has developed a
software module to enable
employees to process invoices
electronically when they are not
connected to the internet.
Invoices can be reviewed and
approved on a PC not connected
to the internet, and mark them for
approve, dispute or forward. The
information is transferred next time
the PC has internet access.
“Due to the decentralized nature
of the oil and gas industry, often
users don’t have access to the
Internet on a continuous basis,”
says Digital Oilfield. “With
OpenInvoice Remote, users that
can be in charge of when and
how they fit the invoice approval Digital Oilfield’s Project Accelerator tool – co-ordinating details of drilling programs
process into their day. This
provides an increased level of automatically paid and any non and approving invoices, receipts
flexibility and improved productivity compliant items flagged up. and other documents. The
for field users.” “Our technology takes a once company can use SAP’s workflow
The company has also onerous, manual process and management tool together with
developed an online software tool automates it – all the while, SupplierConnect.
to manage charges made by reducing errors and time spent DigitalOilfield says it has made
operating companies and suppliers resolving disputes at the end of the the integration because so many of
at oil rigs, using a touch screen. well,” the company says. its oil and gas customers are also
The tool creates an electronic SAP has certified the Digital using SAP. Users of SAP solutions
record of daily charges, so that Oilfield SupplierConnect software can transact easily with all of the
goods and services used can be version 30.1, to say that it can oil and gas suppliers who are
regularly reviewed. The tool can integrate with SAP software. connected to SupplierConnect;
be used on a stand-alone basis, or SupplierConnect is an online also the suppliers can access the
integrated with Digital Oilfield’s system which allows oil and gas workflow management system if
electronic invoicing system, so that companies to link up their supply they are working with an oil
the daily charges can be chain, including generating, routing company which has SAP. Q

Chevron works with DNV on Kongsberg operator

technology qualification tool
Chevron is working with
Norwegian classification
society DNV to develop a
tool for qualifying new
technology. The aim is to
help Chevron improve the
confidence it has in any
new technology it deploys.
Chevron will use the tool to
manage the risks associated with
introducing a new technology or
moving a proven technology into a
more extreme operating
environment.
It is an analytical method which
can be used to predict the
performance of technology, and
look for failure modes and threats
which can lead to schedule
overruns or failure during operation.
Chevron’s goal is to reduce the
risk of deploying new technology,
but make the best out of the new
technology available.
“New technology has not
always had a good reputation in
the oil and gas industry due to
failures resulting from inadequate
qualification programs,” says DNV.
“New technology is often evolved
from existing technologies and put
into more challenging operating
conditions without fully
understanding the parameters that
influence its performance.” Q
training simulator for
Marathon Petroleum
Kongsberg has won a contract to supply an operator
training simulator for a floating production storage
and offshore loading (FPSO) vessel, operated by
Maersk Contractor Norge on behalf of Marathon
Petroleum Norge.
The simulator will be used for training at all stages of oil production.
It will be configured using project specific data from the FPSO. It
should help to reduce unplanned shutdowns and improve ability to
manage the field during shutdowns, Kongsberg says. “The market
for dynamic process simulation is currently very strong,” says
Kongsberg. “It seems that the market is now seeing the advantage of
using dynamic process simulation for engineering studies, test of
control system logic and operator training.” Q

12 digital energy journal • April 2006


Honeywell integrates UniSim with petroleum software
Automation company
Honeywell has announced
plans to integrate its
UniSim design software
with Petroleum Experts’
Integrated Production
Modelling Software
(IPM).
By having the two systems
integrated together, engineers will
be able to link together the design
Kongsberg operator training
simulators in Norway
Kongsberg Maritime has
won two contracts to
deliver its ASSETT
engineering and operator
training simulators for the
Valhall and Ula-Tambar
fields in Norway, operated
by BP Norway.
The simulators will be delivered in
2006 and integrated with the
ABB safety and automation
system being used on the field.
Essent buys McLaren’s enterprise engineer software
Dutch energy company
Essent has purchased the
Enterprise Engineer
application suite from
McLaren Software. It will
use the software to
centrally manage and
control engineering tasks
like drawing
management, concurrent
engineering, and global
collaboration.
Essent’s engineers should be able
to work better together as a result
of having the software. The
company expects the time
employees spend searching for
documents to be reduced by 12
per cent.
Engineers will be able to access
the engineering information from a
central database wherever they
are in the world.
of the system with the model of
how it will work.
IPM is a set of online tools which
oil and gas petroleum engineers
can use to design complete field
models of oil or gas production
systems, including the reservoir,
wells and surface network.
UniSim Design is a tool
developed by Honeywell which
enables engineers to create steady-
state and dynamic models of plant,
The simulators can be used both
to work out ways to optimise
production and to train operators.
“BP’s intentions with the Ula and
Valhall dynamic simulators are to
provide benefits including
improved operator
competency/training, production
optimisation, development/testing
of new ideas/modifications and
training prior to installation, and
testing of new control logic prior
to installation,” says BP. Q
Essent expects
Enterprises
Engineer’s “Work
Manager” to
reduce the time
that employees
search for
documents by at
least 12 percent
The software ensures that users
working independently of each
other do not create multiple
versions of the same document;
which can be used for
performance monitoring,
troubleshooting, business planning
and asset management.
“Integration is very powerful
because it allows all functions
within a customer’s organization to
communicate with a single tool, a
consistent set of models and
technology,” says Honeywell.
Engineers will be able to use the
combined tool to work out how to
Statoil purchases Kongsberg test
simulator for North Sea
Norwegian state oil
company Statoil has
awarded Kongsberg a
contract for an engineering
and control test simulator,
to be used in its Heidrun
oil and gas field, North
Sea.
The simulator will be delivered in
October 2006. It will be used for
testing proposed changes to the
safety and automation system,
there is just one single centrally
managed document.
Essent engineers work with
thousands of drawings, pictures,
April 2006 • digital energy journal
reservoir
maximise production of a field,
and maximise operation of specific
equipment. They can also manage
and optimise assets across many
different wells and link it to ERP
software.
“An operating company needs
to have and maintain a holistic
view of its production capabilities
in order to achieve top level
performance,” says Petroleum
Experts. Q
before they are actually installed
on the rig. The simulator can also
be used for operator training ad
operations support.
Statoil says that it will use the
simulator to increase its
understanding of process
dynamics, develop and check
designs and control strategies,
evaluate startup / shut down
procedures, optimise operations,
analyse bottlenecks, troubleshoot
and evaluate problems. Q
.
quality assurance (QA) papers,
licenses and contracts, all of
which will be managed on the
system Q
13
 reservoir

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14 digital energy journal • April 2006


BP uses wireless
condition monitoring
BP, working together with
Crossbow Technology of
San Jose, California, has
been experimenting with
using 2 inch square wireless
computers, known as
‘motes,’ as part of a
condition monitoring system
on a ship.
B
P wanted to find a system which
could be used for condition
monitoring in all kinds of
applications, so it started looking for
a system which could work in its toughest
industrial environment – a ship.
BP wanted to collect the vibration data of
certain ship engine parts automatically every 18
hours, rather than take a manual vibration
reading every few weeks, as it had been doing
previously.
This would improve safety of seafarers, who
would not have to visit the hazardous engine
room so often, and improve the speed the
company could detect and respond to problems.
The problem is that putting cables from the
engine room to the shipboard computer network
is very expensive, when everything has to be
intrinsically safe and large amounts of data need
to be transferred. Cabling for this type of
application typically costs $20 to $200 a foot.
The solution it ended up with was fitting the
small wireless computers, or ‘motes’ in the engine
room, wired to the vibration sensors. The motes
are produced by Intel and cost $50-100.
BP was so pleased with the system it awarded
it “runner up” in its 2005 Helios Awards for
innovation.
The radio data networks can carry 250 kbps,
quite a high data rate, but not enough to
continually stream vibration data from all of the
sensors.
To reduce the amount of data which needs to
be sent, the motes have computer software
onboard which perform a “Fast Fourier
Transform” (FFT), a mathematical algorithm
designed by Rockwell which describes the
characteristics of the vibration frequency, rather
than sending the raw data.
The motes also have power management
software, which means that they switch on to take
and transmit a reading then switch off, rather than
Right: The X-Bow
Technology wireless
computers as used
by BP
being on all the time. This means that a battery
can last for 5 years.
The motes communicate in a ‘mesh’ system,
which means that the data can be sent from one
mote to another.
So if one mote cannot communicate with the
main network for some reason, but another mote
can, the data can still get through. This issue was
of particular concern on a ship, where there is so
much metal and possibilities of different radio
fields which can interfere with the transmission.
The project also experimented with small
generators which converted the vibration of the
machine into electricity to run the motes.
The vessel chosen was 132,000 dwt shuttle
tanker Loch Rannoch, running between storage
vessel Schiehallion to a terminal at Sullom Voe,
Shetland Islands.
The shipboard machinery was fitted with 150
Rockwell Automation accelerometers, with up to
6 accelerometers on each machine, one for each
axis and two additional measuring points. There
was a tachometer to measure how fast the
machine was running and the angle of phase.
The Motes were positioned about 2 feet away
from the accelerometers. They transmitted the
data to the shipboard computer network by
802.15.4 wi-fi communications in the UK
standard 868 MHz range. Gateways were fitted
each with 2 GB memory, so they could collect
data even if out of contact with the main
shipboard network.
The motes and their batteries were put in a
April 2006 • digital energy journal
reservoir
Wireless equipment
monitoring computers
might ultimately prove
useful for monitoring
equipment in tough
environments like BP’s
Northstar Alaskan
terminal, above.
No cabling is
required, the
battery lasts for 5
years, and the
computer makes
sure only the
important data
is communicated,
not everything
special enclosure so they would be intrinsically
safe [could not cause a spark].
Crossbow Technology
The systems were originally developed in the
University of California Berkeley; Crossbow
Technology is taking them into the outside world.
Jorg Betholdt, marketing manager of
Crossbow, says he sees wireless sensor networks
as the next stage in the development of the
internet, removing the PCs and desks.
Crossbow is installing the technology in many
different applications, including temperature
sensing and pressure sensing, where radio can
be used to replace wire. Cabling in certain
safety critical applications can cost $2000 per
foot, and there can be 150 feet distance
between each sensor.
The data communications is an open standard
802.15.4, which means that devices from
different manufacturers can talk to each other. The
network communications standard is Zigbee;
Crossbow chair’s Zigbee’s working group for
wireless sensor networks.
The reason that 802.11 standard wi-fi was
not chosen is because wi-fi needs continuous
power, and a lot of it. The Zigbee system only
needs to be power when it is actually sending
or receiving data.
“If you want to measure temperature, you don’t
need to take temperature reading every second -
you could take a measurement every say 10
mins. In between the device sleeps and doesn’t
consume energy - and so you get a long battery
lifetime,” he says.
Crossbow has also fitted the motes for
monitoring moisture content of soil in golf courses
(so the greens can be kept in optimum condition);
on fire detection systems, because they can be
more reliable than cable based systems, which
can fail if one cable is broken. Q
15
 communication news

Inmarsat launches mobile broadband satcom

Mobile satellite
communications company
Inmarsat has launched a
492 kbps mobile satellite
communications service,
with data costing between
$4 and $7 per megabyte.
Voice communications will
cost under $1 a minute.
Users only need a terminal and a
laptop computer to access the
internet anywhere. The terminals
cost $1500 to $3500 – one by
Nera has dimensions of 20 x 15
x 4.5cm and weighs 995g
including the battery. It costs
$2500 and can carry data at
240 kbps (transmit), 384 kbps
(receive) and 32 or 64 kbps data
streaming.
Inmrasat BGAN – send up to 512kbps
with a laptop sized terminal anywhere
on the planet apart from the poles
The service is much cheaper
than 3g roaming, Inmarsat says,
which can cost $15 to $45 per
megabyte, and is subject to
availability of a 3g network.
Inmarsat anticipates that the oil
and gas industry will be big users
of the terminal, because they can
have low cost, portable satellite
data connectivity, without the cost
and commitment of a VSAT system.
A number of oil and gas
companies are conducting field
trials, Inmarsat says.
Pelle Maerkedahl Larsen, land
business development manager
with Inmarsat, says he thinks
Inmarsat BGAN can compete with
VSAT satellite communications at all
stages of exploration until the oil
company has made a commitment
to set up a permanent installation,
when it will probably need VSAT to
handle the enormous data
communication requirement (VSAT
can carry 2 mbps and upwards).
However BGAN will save oil
companies from the trouble of
flying in temporary VSAT
equipment, or ‘flyaway kit’ when
they have not made a commitment
to a permanent installation, with
two 400 lb boxes containing the
dish and modem. “This is much
more flexible,” he says.
Satellite company Stratos has
announced that it is taking orders
for Inmarsat BGAN. Jim Parm,
president of Stratos, says that
BGAN is “perfectly suited to oil
and gas” market, where personnel
need communications outside fixed
and GPRS networks, and
communications faster than GSM
can provide. Q

ExxonMobil uses ToolWatch tracking software in Nigeria

Mobil Producing Nigeria,
an oil production
subsidiary of ExxonMobil,
is using ToolWatch
Corporation’s tool and
inventory tracking
software, to try and curb
losses from its warehouse
which were rising to
$50,000 a month.
Items in the warehouse are used to
keep the company’s oil production
running, including facility
maintenance and construction.
Items being stolen include
computers, oil pumps and
electrical lighting supplies. They
are stolen from individuals both
within and outside the
organisation.
The items are painted with a
forensic tagging fluid called
Synthetic DNA, distributed by
ToolWatch. The fluid interacts with
the item being tagged at a
molecular level, so it cannot be
removed, even if the item is
melted down. If the item is later
recovered, there is a foolproof
means of proving it belongs to
ExxonMobil. The marking is
invisible to the human eye
but can be read with a handheld
scanner using specially designed
software. ToolWatch also
provides signage for display in
the warehouse so all visitors
and employees can see that the
items have been identified in this
way. Q

Orbcomm – VSAT network in Timor Sea

new gateway
in Kazakhstan
Orbcomm, which operates
a network of low earth
orbiting satellites suitable
for communicating short
text messages at low cost,
has opened a land earth
station (gateway) in
Almaty, Kazakhstan, to
offer services in China,
Russia and the Middle East.
LeoSat, the Orbcomm country
representative for Kazakhstan, is
already marketing satellite data
services to the oil and gas industry.
The system is useful for tracking
and monitoring remotely located
assets, which are out of reach of
normal wireless communications
(eg cellular). Q
Australian Satellite Services has installed a VSAT satellite communications network
for production platforms in the Timor Sea (Indian Ocean), connecting the platforms
with sites in Australia and East Timor.
The network is controlled from Australian Satellite Services headquarters in Adelaide. The network has a
star / mesh structure and uses IP for both data and voice. As part of the network, a 2.4m VSAT dish has
been installed on the Safe Caledonia accommodation vessel, where staff working on the production
platforms live. Q
ENSCO works with RigNet on Mexico Gulf rigs
Drilling contractor ENSCO has contracted for the future”, said Tom Chapman, Director, I.T.,
offshore satellite communications company ENSCO.
RigNet to work together to improve RigNet will work together with CapRock Services
satellite communications on ENSCO’s rigs in Corp to provide the satellite infrastructure. The system
the US Gulf of Mexico. will be remotely supportable as much as possible.
“Traditional telecommunication systems on offshore rigs
The contract follows a series of RigNet installations on are often slow, costly, and unreliable,” RigNet says.
ENSCO rigs in South East Asia and a pilot project in the “Instead of sending experts out to every rig to collect
Gulf of Mexico. data and to manage projects, many operators and
“We view RigNet’s Internet based solution as the service companies are now looking for ways to manage
standard in how offshore drilling projects will run their projects from shore to help reduce costs and make
communications and software applications management processes more effective.” Q

16 digital energy journal • April 2006

 communication news

Royal Quantum buys X-Treme Bluewater joins OilCamp North

Oilfield Communications
Vancouver venture capitalist Royal Quantum has
signed a letter of intent to acquire X-Treme Oilfield
Communications of Calgary, which provides high speed
satellite communications to the oil and gas industry.
X-Treme provides portable and fixed satellite communications to
remote areas at broadband speeds. It has over 25 fixed systems and
2 portable units in operation. It provides 1.2m mobile dish Ka band
communications for $125/day equipment rental, and 66cm fixed
dishes for $1,890. Q
Sea network system
North sea oil and gas IT communications network
OilCamp, owned by Norway state telecom
company Telenor, reports that oil services company
Bluewater has joined the network. Bluewater
wanted to connect its floating production storage
and offloading (FPSO) vessel Munin, on operations
in China for Statoil, to both Bluewater
headquarters in UK and Statoil in Norway, using
the network.

Schlumberger uses SatManage to
manage sat networks
Schlumberger has chosen
the SatManage software
from UK company Parallel
to manage its satellite
communications networks.
SatManage provides a single
online place where Schlumberger’s
customers can analyse the
performance of the network and its
performance, now and in the past.
Customers can set up “trouble
tickets” if something goes wrong
and can see exactly where their
Stallion launches StaRComm
rig VSAT services
Stallion Oilfield Services of
Houston, Texas, has
launched StaRComm, a
VSAT satellite
communications service
designed for the oil and gas
industry.
The system will use both of Oilcamp’s Secure Oil Information
Link (SOIL) nodes in Aberdeen and Stavanger. OilCamp
announced on Nov 17 that sub sea engineering contractor
Subsea 7 was joining the network in the UK.
mobile satellite dishes are. Subsea 7 will use the network to streamline and simplify its
The software will be installed at communications, both between its offices in Aberdeen and
Schlumberger’s customer service Stavanger, and with its partners, clients and suppliers in the UK
centre in Aberdeen and integrated and Norway.
into all of Schlumberger’s teleports. Users of the network can share data securely, with trusted
Schlumberger can also use the business partners and suppliers, with guaranteed speed,
software to manage its overall reliability and security. It was established in Norway in 1998
network performance, and be able and has 16 registered members, recently being expanded into
to check the signal quality of the the UK. Q
whole network on one screen.
They can use the tool to identify
and resolve faults, and monitor
how long it takes faults to be
resolved. Q Using satcom in the oil and
gas industry
Stallion believes that it can now
provide a “fully integrated” drilling
support service, including housing,
equipment rental, solids control
services and the entire
communications infrastructure, or as
it puts it, “everything but the rig.” Q

ExxonMobil uses Blue Sky to

track ships, planes, trucks
Exxon Mobil will be using
the Blue Sky Iridium
satellite tracking system to
track and manage its
aircraft, vessels, cars and
trucks around the world
over the internet.
Blue Sky Network claims to have
the only satellite tracking system
tailored for the oil and gas
industry, with the package
including hardware, data service
and internet mapping.
The communications system can
be used to send messages, make
phone calls. Exxon Mobil is “a true
global leader in vendor selection
processes, including rigorous internal
best practices and security
considerations. In the oil and gas
industry,” says Blue Sky Network. Q Photo courtesy Telenor Satellite Services

April 2006 • digital energy journal 17

 data/knowledge management

Randy Clark appointed CEO of POSC

The Petrotechnical Open
Standards Consortium
(POSC), which develops IT
data and business process
standards for the oil and
gas industry, has
appointed Randy Clark as
its new president and CEO.
Mr Clark was previously senior
vice president with cc-hubwoo
/Trade-Ranger, an electronic
purchasing system used by Shell,
Total, Statoil and ConocoPhillips.
He has been involved in many IT
standards efforts including ebXML,
UN/CEFACT, and CEN/ISSS.
For four years he has been chair
of the Petroleum Industry Data
eXchange (PIDX), the e-commerce
subcommittee of the American
Petroleum Institute.
Mr Clark says that developing
standards if very important if the oil
and gas industry is going to deliver
Randy Clark, new president and CEO
of POSC
integrated real time on demand
information, which it will need to
do to increase efficiency.
“POSC is uniquely positioned to
help drive those results through
collaborative development and
consistent support of those critical
standards,” he says.
“Randy brings great experience
in EP standards to POSC and has
a real sense of how our industry
will create significant value from
standards,” says Herbert Yuan of
Shell, outgoing chairman of POSC.
POSC has also elected Dr
Jonathan Lewis of Halliburton and
Tom Halbouty of Pioneer Natural
Resources as its new chairman and
vice chairman of POSC board of
directors.
Dr Jonathan Lewis is vice
president of innovation and
marketing with Halliburton digital
and consulting solutions division,
handling research and
development, intellectual property,
marketing and strategy.
Mr Halbouty is VP and CIO of
Pioneer Natural Resources, with
responsibility for Pioneer’s
geoscience, engineering and
business computing. He has 29
years experience in the energy
industry including strategic planning,
business consulting and technology.
“The changes occurring at
POSC have been made to step up
standards delivery essential in
realizing the Smart Fields vision,”
he says.
“The organization is now well-
positioned to also facilitate
improvements in business
efficiency required to meet the
productivity challenges facing the
upstream industry.”
POSC is a not for profit
organisation, with the aim of
connecting together “industry
people, issues and ideas” to
address E&P information
“challenges and opportunities”. It
develops open standards for
integrating business processes in
exploration and production, using
internet communication. Q

Well Data Technologies buys geoLOGIC acquires Petrocube

CTX products
Houston and Aberdeen oil
and gas software company
Well Data Technologies has
acquired the CTX cost
tracking and analysis
software from Vyla Ltd.
The software was originally
developed in 1992 and is used by
BP to track the complex costs
involved in drilling oil and gas wells.
Well Data Technologies believes
that the software fits well into its
existing software portfolio which
focuses on performance improvement
and cost reduction, making it very
clear what the well costs are. The
CTX software can work on its own,
or work within an approvals
workflow system such as SAP. Q
Calgary oil and gas knowledge management company
geoLogic has acquired the Petrocube software, developed
by PetroSleuth Inc, which can be used for financial,
technical and geostatistical analysis of reservoirs and
individual oil wells.
geoLOGIC has also entered a long term development agreement with
AJM Petroleum Consultants, which had an exclusive marketing
arrangement for PetroCube, and provided associated consultancy
support. Q

Halliburton launches Discovery

OpenSpirit launches version 2.9 on OpenWorks software
Texas software company OpenSpirit has launched
version 2.9 of its oil and gas data management system. Halliburton is commercially based geoscience interpretation
The software aims to provide all workers with comprehensive and launching its Discovery on system, the company claims.
flexible data access and streamlined workflows. Users can access all OpenWorks software, to Oil companies using them both
OpenSpirit-enabled data stores, wherever they are. connect its GeoGraphix can manage and interpret the data
The new software can handle 2D and 3D seismic data much better, Discovery software to using the best available tools in the
the company says, including display of layers, point sets, polylines Landmark software’s industry, without any data transfer /
and polygons. OpenWorks system. replication. The integration also
The software can also read custom co-ordinate systems from other enables oil companies to access
software packages much more efficiently. It can connect with PPDM OpenWorks is the most widely data on OpenWorks using
data, GeoPLUS Petra data, and KINGDOM from Seismic Micro used project data management Windows based tools.
Technology and ArcSDE. system in the exploration and Geologists and geophysicists often
The company claims that version 2.8 led to workflow efficiency production industry, the company spend up to 70 per cent of their time
improvements of “99 per cent” and data transfer rate improved by claims. moving data between different
811 per cent. Q Discovery is the most integrated systems and synchronizing
and comprehensive Windows databases, Halliburton says. Q

18 digital energy journal • April 2006

 data/knowledge management

IDEAS appoints Latin America rep OpenSpirit appoints sales /

IDEAS International, a supplier of financial and logistics

marketing president
systems to oil and gas industry, has appointed Fernando
Caldas Gacharna, based in Columbia, as its
representative in South America.
OpenSpirit, a Houston Occidental, Chevron and
IDEAS notes that Latin America has some of the Western hemisphere’s company which develops Apache. Before this he was
richest petroleum reserves, supplying 20 per cent of US oil imports. middleware to link president and CEO of Bell
The company has also appointed Alexander Fernandez as regional together different oil and Geospace and vice president
director for Latin America. Q gas software products, has Americas of Landmark Graphics.
appointed Larry White as Prior to that he was in various
VP sales and marketing. functions at Schlumberger,

Microsoft and Gulf Energy MoU Mr White was previously global

Microsoft Qatar has signed a
memorandum of
understanding with Gulf
Energy, a consortium of
energy consultants, to
develop new enterprise
software for the Energy City
Qatar project,
Energy City Qata, located in Doha,
aims to become the first integrated
“business energy centre” in the
Middle East, providing a range of
industry and marketing services to oil
and gas companies.
A special signing ceremony was
held in Qatar at the same time as
Microsoft’s Global Energy Forum
event in Houston.
IT venture capitalist Accelerator
Technology Holdings also signed the
agreement.
Microsoft believes that by
supporting the venture, it will help
people work better together, manage
projects and improve operations. Q
including marketing and technical
manager for Wireline Atlantic,
account manager for regional sales manager and
Input/Output Inc, a Texas seismic offshore field engineer.
survey company. He had OpenSpirit claims to be one of the
responsibility for accounts of top 50 companies in Houston for
ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, revenue growth this year. Q
Oil companies to “invest profits
into data management”
Oil companies will invest a large proportion of their 2005
profits into software, hardware and services related to data
management, according to a study by US consultancy
Energy Insights.

Saudi Aramco uses
ActivIdentity system
Saudi Aramco, Saudi
Arabia’s state oil company,
has announced plans to
install ActiveIdentity’s
Enterprise Access Card
system. It will give its
45,000 employees a
special USB key, which
they can use to access
Aramco resources. They
also have to type in a PIN
(personal identification
number).
Saudi Aramco is providing all its employees with ActivIdentity
cards like this one
The key gives employees access to
many different software
applications, so they don’t need to
log on individually for each one.
“With ActivIdentity, we found not
only just that, but a solution that
lowers our total cost of ownership,
fits with our IT environment, and
provides us with future-proof
infrastructure enterprise-wide,” says
Dr. Ibrahim Mishari, chief
information officer at Saudi
Aramco. Q
Efficient data management in the oil and gas industry can have a very real
impact on operating efficiency, and therefore profitability,” the company says.
Energy Insights has published a new report, called “A Comprehensive
Picture of Data Management in the Upstream Industry - Concepts, Challenges,
and Opportunities” (Doc# EI10081).
The study makes a number of recommendations to oil and gas companies
as to how to do more with data management systems - including integrating
databases, consolidating applications, centralising IT systems throughout the
organisation, centralising data servers, making IT systems ready for audits.
“There is an imminent need for thought leadership to deal with the industry’s
“managed chaos,” Energy Insights says. The report is 10 pages long and
priced at $4,500. It can be purchased online from www.idc.com Q
Energy Insights shortlists risk
management software
Massachusetts energy The software tools were
consultancy Energy Insights assessed for fitness for market
has released a shortlist of (functionality, interoperability,
IT suppliers or energy architecture, quality of service
trading and risk /support, and cost); ownership
management, producing confidence (looking at the
software tools to help technology supplier’s strategy,
analyse energy risk. financials, commitment and
customer satisfaction). The vendors
The company estimates that large evaluated were Allegro
utility energy companies spend 13 Development; Global Energy
per cent of their budgets on energy Decisions; Navita; Openlink
trading and risk management. Oil Financial; SAS Risk Dimensions;
and gas companies spend 10.8 Solarc; SunGuard Energy; and
per cent of their budgets. Triplepoint Technologies. Q

April 2006 • digital energy journal 19

 data/knowledge management
How does Schlumberger, possibly the world’s most respected knowledge company, manage
its knowledge internally? We had a look at its system
Knowledge
management in
Schlumberger
T
he ‘Smart field’ requires that all of
the people in the company,
including geologists,
geophysicists, reservoir engineers,
drilling engineers and management, always
have the best information they can possibly
have at their fingertips.
The reality is that most working environments
are a long way away from that.
Most of us have had experiences of having to
search far and wide for the information we
need, including internet bulletin boards, trying to
track down colleagues, and trawling data
archives for non-indexed documents and e-mails.
Most of us have been very frustrated by
unstructured internet bulletin boards, developed
by software companies as a perfect [in their
view] means of encouraging customers to
support each other so the software company
doesn’t have to provide support itself, but in
reality just frustrating the user who spends hours
in fruitless searches.
Most of us have been in the situation of
needing knowledge possessed by one single
work colleague, who was impossible to reach,
or carefully metered his knowledge as a way of
maintaining his status in the company.
Many of us have been the person in the
company with knowledge, but while wanting to
be helpful to colleagues continuously asking for
information, found that our boss did not factor in
the time spent helping colleagues in the
workload he expects us to achieve by the end
of the week.
And many of us have been in the situation of
discovering a special technique, wanting to
share it with the whole company, but lacking the
system to do it.
So how does Schlumberger, which claims to be
the “world’s leading supplier of technology, project
management and information solutions to the oil
and gas industry” tackle all of these problems?
20 digital energy journal • April 2006
The answer is very sophisticated online
knowledge management systems, company
activities divided into ‘communities of interest’ for
employees doing specific tasks or using specific
software irrespective of geographical location.
Senior employees given a specific role of
helping other Schlumberger employees around
the world in specific areas, putting them in
touch with someone who can help, and
‘validating’ any content posted on line as to
whether or not they think it is valid and relevant.
“Customers expect the entire organisational
know-how of Schlumberger to be behind every
service and product delivered to them, says
David Lecore, leader of Eureka knowledge
interchange community.
“They want high and uniform quality of
software support globally, rapid inclusion of
ideas and new technology into products and
services, rapid replication of best practice, David Lecore, leader of Eureka knowledge
lessons learned and solutions.” interchange community
History hundreds of separate intranet sites, and over a
thousand bulletin boards and e-mail forums, with
The company first developed an in-house no standard management.
knowledge management strategy, in 1997; It needed to find a way to link them all
aiming to develop a “new work environment together, so all of the information could be
where knowledge and experience can be easily made available to the whole company.
easily shared,” in the words of the company The first step was to launch a way for field
chairman at that time, Euan Baird. operations to get in touch with experts in
“We must become experts in capturing engineering centres and to give field staff a
knowledge, integrating and preserving it and one-stop-shop to technical information. The
then making what has been learned quickly and InTouch service was set up to enable this direct
easily available to anyone who will be involved access to experts and validated information. The
in the next business decision,” he said in a InTouch service now has 150 dedicated experts
1997 speech. covering 80 technology and service domains.
“We believe this new culture will be defined
by information management and its supporting Knowledge systems
technology, and that building these new systems
is essential for our own internal efficiency and The company has five different knowledge
that of our clients.” management systems, addressing different
At the time the company had developed knowledge areas. There is a Corporate
 data/knowledge management
Directory for personnel and company Operational Technical Support Tickets to InTouch - by month, by Segment
information, which also includes Career
Networking Profiles which are like on-line
resumés; Eureka, the internal Communities of
Practice program which has 24 different
Communities, supporting 127 Special Interest
Groups, each with a leader(s) who is
democratically elected; The Hub, the company
Intranet system including standard content
management and search tools; QUEST, A
Quality Health Safety and Environmental,
incident reporting and investigation system and
InTouch, which connects people to dedicated
experts and to validated technical information.

InTouch
InTouch was started in 1996, as the technical
support service to field operations. Dedicated
experts support field operations on a 24-by-7
basis, and cover a technology and service
domain. These InTouch Engineers also manage
the validation of new shared knowledge and are
responsible for keeping the knowledge base for
each domain clean and up-to-date.
Note: Schlumberger pays specific employees
(InTouch Engineers) to help other employees, this
role is very highly considered, and so it is one
that people aspire to. How many other
companies do you know which pay its own
staff to help each other?
InTouch includes a designated network of
experts, supporting the InTouch Engineers, who
can be called upon to provide expert
assistance, on a part-time basis, as required,
ACEs – Applied Community Experts are field
based experts and SMEs - Subject Matter
Experts, are based in the technology centres.
In the first instance, someone with a problem
will first of all, search the existing knowledge
base, if the answer is not found or further
assistance is required a ‘ticket is raised, using a
The InTouchSupport.com website, or via
telephone or email. The ticket is managed by
an InTouch Engineer, who can also ask the
designated network of experts. The information
the experts provide is then put into the
knowledge base as well as provided to the
person who needs help.
InTouch contains many knowledge ‘types’
including “best practice”, “training”, “internet link,”
“reference page,” “documentation”, “solution”,
“lesson learned / case history,” “technical alert”,
“announcement” all in a single knowledge based
and classified using a multifaceted classification,
which is constantly maintained to represent the
ever changing work environment.
The InTouch Engineer can flag particularly
useful information to be ‘pushed’ out to field
operations, so they read it straight away, rather
than waiting until they find it on the system.
The biggest level of filtering is performed by
the InTouch engineers, who go through everything
which is posted and validates it, prior to
publication, and label information as particularly
useful by publishing it to key ‘Reference Pages’
covering various products and services.
Number of technical support tickets raised per month on InTouch in different subject areas. Note that the
number of tickets gradually rose, as more employees started using the system; usage declined over the last 6
months of 2005, which Schlumberger believes is due to employees finding what they want on the knowledge
base rather than raising a ticket
There are plenty of other benefits to the
system. It makes it easier to assess new
technology, and roll it out quickly to the entire
company if it proves to be working. Customers
can be served much more quickly.
InTouch monitors many
trends and metrics such
as the number of tickets
submitted per month;
how many unique users;
how many items are
added, behaviour of
users for searching before
submitting, top search
terms for the month etc
Example
In one example, a Schlumberger engineer in
Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, required a ‘new
script’ to transfer data in one format, into a
software application. He first looked on the
InTouch knowledge base and could not find
what he required.
His next step was to ‘raise an InTouch ticket,’
contacting, via InTouchSupport.com to an
InTouch engineer in the Calgary Technology
Centre, who replied the same day saying he
had raised a ‘bug report.’
Two days later, the engineer in Calgary
reported back that the script had been created
and tested. The script was successfully deployed.
A few months later, another engineer in Europe
encountered a similar problem and worked out
how to fix it using the information in InTouch.
Two months after that, the same UK based
engineer made further improvements, publishing
these to the InTouch Engineer for validation.
Statistics
The company reports that usage of the
system gradually increased, as employees
were encouraged to use it. However the
number of tickets created has recently gone
down, as employees were encouraged to
‘Search Smart – Search First’ and discovered
that more of the answers they were looking for
were already in InTouch.
To find out how well the system is working,
Schlumberger measures how well the system is
implemented, how many people use it,
whether they are satisfied and what impact it
has on the business.
It monitors many trends and metrics such as
the number of tickets submitted per month; how
many unique users; how many items are added,
behaviour of users for searching before
submitting, top search terms for the month etc.
The software also has tools to measure the
usefulness of information, from what people
say about it / how often it is viewed, so the
most useful information is always at the top of
the pile.
During 2005, a total of 81,000 tickets were
created on the system, 14,000 new items were
validated on the knowledge base, including
3,182 best practices, 2317 solutions, 1929
lessons learned and 648 technical alerts.
Darwinian
An interesting aspect the Schlumberger
knowledge management story is the
‘Darwinian’ way in which systems that are now
enterprise-wide and part of the fabric of the
company started out as good ideas in a small
part of the company, but those strong enough
(read valuable and effective) received the
support and resources they need to prosper
and expand. Q

April 2006 • digital energy journal 21

 data/knowledge management

A new
model for data
management
and to monitor progress against that decision,
Hamish Wilson, whilst providing evidence for the next decision.
managing director of Paras In theory, this should create a data
management mindset that focuses on project data
Consulting, presents an capture and the collation of information that
supports a given decision.
alternative theory on how oil Yet data management practices to date place
great emphasis on the completeness and quality
companies could organise of technical data alone.
their data, so people get the We do not explicitly link data to decisions in
the holistic sense – by which we mean the
data they need integration of commercial engineering and
technical domains.
Day to day decisions
It is useful to explore the granularity of the decision.
In the exploration and reservoir management
domains the decisions tend to be large scale
and relatively infrequent.
It would be a great breakthrough, if, for
example, we could use the reservoir simulation
model to inform decisions on day to day well
and facilities operations, and perhaps further to
respond to market demands for gas.
This calls for a level of integration and real

T
he focus of data management
professionals to date has been
largely on technical data. Despite
this focus, a review of presentation
titles over the last 15-20 years yields a
remarkably consistent picture.
It might be heretical to point out that perhaps
we have not made much progress, bearing in
mind that although the continual advance of
technology has had an impact, the underlying
issues of data management remain the same.
The internet and migration from UNIX to PC
have merely magnified the issues of old, whilst
the implementations of web portals to speed up
access to data, spotlights the problems of data
completeness, quality and timeliness.
In an environment of infinite demand we are
never going to completely solve the issue of data
management to the professional users’ satisfaction.
Companies will never be able to justify the
cost of the investment to make the data ‘pure’.
Interviews of the professional user community,
by data management staff, will always highlight
issues of data completeness and poor quality
service levels.
Therefore, we should accept there is an
irreducible level of user concerns and move
forward.
Decision making data
It is an obvious statement that all technical work
that is undertaken in an oil company is for two
purposes – to support a given investment decision
It is asserted that outside the retention of the time response that possibly the technology does
‘decision support package’, data can be not support, but certainly there continues to be
“binned”! profound organisational boundaries to
overcome.
For most of the companies with whom we
engage, the issues outlined above come under
the ‘smart fields’, ‘e-field’, ‘field-of-the future’
type initiatives.
From marketing to production
There still appears to be a gap between the
subsurface models and well and platform
operations.
Major decisions in the oil and gas industry
are about investments of capital and monitoring
resultant cash flows.
It is in this area that discipline of data
A great deal of information is generated during oil and
management can have a big impact on
gas operations – could we manage it in ways which
will better help us make business decisions? corporate performance.
ABOUT PARAS CONSULTING
PARAS CONSULTING is a management consultancy to the upstream oil and gas
industry, one of the market leaders on subsurface process and technology and
exploration strategy. Its main areas of expertise are in program and project
management in E&P technical and commercial IT/IS systems, as well as capital
allocation and budgeting processes. In addition to standard project
management offerings it provides new practices in strategy and change
management packages. Paras Consulting believes it is the only independent
company dedicated to the upstream oil and gas sector offering these services.
The consultants are technical specialists, with wide-ranging in-depth experience
in the industry. As an independent company, they are also able to act as an
impartial advisor to any solution provider. Q

22 digital energy journal • April 2006


Oil company decision making is based on metrics showing in this tree. Shouldn’t companies structure how they
collect and manage data accordingly?
There are five domains of data that require
management: customer relationship
management data (marketing); accounting data
(financial); reserves accounting; production
engineering (production); and technical
(geological / geophysical, and the domain of
traditional data management).
The premise of a business need for
information to support capital investment
decisions and progress monitoring, calls for an
integration of these five disciplines within the
data and information management arena.
Our experience suggests there is a brief
interaction at budget time, if at all, and then all
go their separate ways thereafter, or at least
until the next budget.
Note that we have included the market as a
key discipline to be integrated.
As gas becomes much more a major strategic
theme for a number of companies, so the
integration of market pull for gas becomes
increasingly important.
Data to answer questions
The information management infrastructure
of a company should be designed to answer
certain executive questions.
For example, how are you performing relative
to your original plan? Can it be demonstrated
data/knowledge management
that capital is being invested in the best
options?
If the available capital was increased or
decreased by ‘X’, what would be the impact?
What can be done to improve prediction
accuracy, and improve the capital efficiency of
the operation?
These are easy questions to pose, but in the
absence of integration of the key data
disciplines, they are difficult to answer.
Linking data
One of the major issues to overcome in the
integration of these disciplines is finding a ‘hook’
that links the data types and sets together.
The obvious first choice would be the well, as
the key item that connects up the subsurface
domain to the surface. Wells create the value
(oil and gas flow out of them) and wells incur
costs; collections of wells form fields.
Joining up predicted and actual technical
outcomes, with predicted and actual cost
outcomes and then linking these to a budget, is
not possible in most companies.
Financial systems are keyed off an AFE number
that is linked to a lease, licence or property.
Reserves are associated with pools and
leases, and production to wells.
A key conclusion therefore is a plea to
April 2006 • digital energy journal
standardise on well names within a company,
and to match AFEs to wells.
The issue of granularity arises with budgeting
and portfolio management.
Most companies prepare and manage
budgets to a field level. Portfolio management
also takes place at the field level.
Given that the unit of investment and cost is
the well, it might be preferable to budget to the
well and perhaps work over level.
The key barrier to achieving this is that most
portfolio management software packages
cannot handle the complexity needed. This
remains a challenge for the portfolio
management personnel.
Data management and
work units
In process modelling language, the unit of
work is a unique item that is created by and
managed by a given process. In general, value
is added to a unit of work as it progresses
through a process.
In our data management world, the unit of
work is the data item; well logs, seismic
sections, reports. These are collected up into
wells, and surveys with further regional indices.
In the technical domain the unit of work is
the prospect, field, reservoir and well
relationship. These are the ‘things’ that
technical teams create and work on. These are
also the bases on which decisions are taken.
These are the issues that the business cares
about and the business performance metrics
are keyed off.
Given this business need, we suggest that
technical data management is aligned to this
unit work.
The unit of work model calls for data
structures to be based round the project.
Most digital data is organised in this way
through workstations. However this structure
does not tend to extend through into the
commercial and financial domains.
Oil companies are managed to a set of well
known performance metrics that include issues
such as return on investment, finding/finding
and development costs, reserves and reserves
replacement, net income per barrel (see
diagram).
At the highest level, the information
management systems deliver these metrics.
However as we drill down into the supporting
components we find that these do not directly
support the key company performance metrics.
In conclusion therefore, performance
management is a critical skill for oil company
management teams.
It remains outside the remit of traditional data
management specialists, but we believe that
there is a clear role for data management to be
more closely aligned with oil company
performance management.
This can be done by building integration
hooks around wells, fields and prospects. Q
23
 data/knowledge management
JODI opens world
oil database
JODI (Joint Oil Data Initiative)
has opened up its database to
the public; anybody can log
in to the JODI website and
find out about flows of
different oils from 92 countries
(90 per cent of world
production) and get an
assessment of the data quality.
T
he database was opened at
inauguration of the
International Energy Forum
Secretariat (IEFS) in Saudi
Arabia on November 19, 2005.
JODI is set up by seven international
organisations – APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation), Eurostat (European Union
Statistical Information Service), IEA (International
Energy Authority), IEFS (International Energy
Forum Secretariat), OLADE (Organizacion
Latinoamericana de Energía ), OPEC
(Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries) and UNSD (United Nations Statistics
Division).
The role of JODI is to collect and release
monthly oil statistics, but also to raise political
awareness of the difficulties encountered in
improving data reliability and timeliness.
Anybody can log into the database over the
JODI website, and see how much oil comes out
of each country, and also how accurate the
data is assessed to be.
For example, the database notes that
production figures from Saudi Arabia show
“Significant differences when comparing the
24 digital energy journal • April 2006
data with those reported by a range of
secondary sources.”
Data is available for seven different products:
crude oil, LPG, gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil,
fuel oil and total oil.
There are flows for production, demand,
stock levels and changes.
Data can be provided in barrels, tons and
litres from 92 different countries.
The project has led to improved networks and
statistical systems in many countries, and has
encouraged attitudes to confidentiality to loosen
up, the organisation says. Contacts between oil
companies, countries and organisations have
also built up.
This should help double check data. For
example a country’s figures of oil shipped can
be correlated against the number of tanker
vessels leaving the port and their capacity.
JODI reports that assessing data quality
proved very hard, due to differences in
methodology in the different countries and a
lack of comparable sources of information.
Priority was given to the top 30 oil producer
countries when assessing the data.
“The information
provided by the
database will help
stabilize oil markets and
the broader world
economy”
Gordon Brown, UK Chanceller
You can find
out the best
available
information
about oil flows
from different
countries on the
Jodi database
JODI believes that for the top 30 producers,
timeliness of submission of data, coverage and
reliability have reached reasonable levels.
The challenge is now to increase coverage
to other countries, reduce the delay in data
submissions and further improve data quality.
At a JODI meeting on November 24th
2005, the African Petroleum Producers
Association (APPA), the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the Organization of Arab
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) were
invited to attend the meeting as observers.
The organisations in JODI agreed that the first
priority was to consolidate the existing
database, increase data quality, and make a
manual on definitations and methodologies used
in JODI.
The initiative was set up at the end of the
1990s, when there was awareness that the lack
of reliable oil information was increasing the
volatility of the market.
The project got international government
minister support at the 7th International Energy
Forum in Riyadh in November 2000.
The project was launched in April 2001,
with a primary goal of raising awareness of
the need for more data transparency, not to
build a database.
The first priority was for the organisations
involved to assess the quality of oil data from
the countries in each organisation, to qualify /
quantify the lack of transparency.
55 countries had joined the project within six
months, and 70 countries had joined after 12
months, representing 90 per cent of global oil
supply and demand.
The project received further international
political support at the 8th International Energy
Forum in Osaka, Japan in 2002, and
following this, the organisations involved got
agreement from their member countries to
make the project a permanent reporting
mechanism.
To quote UK Chanceller Gordon Brown,
“The information provided by the database will
help stabilize oil markets and the broader
world economy.”
To quote U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel
W. Bodman, “Increased knowledge about
supply and consumption levels would help
stabilize markets.”
Since then, the number of countries
participating increased, and the submissions
became more timely, more complete and of
higher quality. Q
 digital energy
e change
www.deex.com

Digital Energy Exchange is a new generation

data exchange service to enable simple but secure
collaboration across the oil and gas industry

• file exchange
- transfer, storage and sharing of files
• RT data exchange
- sharing of real time data

• application exchange
- software application service provision

“Data will be able to flow to those most qualified

to use it, regardless of their location. This will
allow geographic and organisational
transparency to encourage collaborative
exchanges of knowledge and best practices”

Digital Oilfield of the Future

Cambridge Energy Research Associates

enabling secure collaboration

www.deex.com
 data/knowledge management
Digital Energy Journal attended the Society of Petroleum Engineers London conference on
digital oil and gas security, in London on Dec 8-9, 2005

Digital oil
and gas security
S
ecurity could well grow to become
the biggest oil and gas IT issue in the
coming years, if it isn’t already, with
many oil and gas companies giving
IT security the same priority as physical security.
We know that terrorism groups have oil and
gas infrastructure in their sights, because they
have said so. We know their expertise in
hacking into computer systems is increasing,
probably at the same rate that security software
is being developed to keep them out, because
we have seen this in other business areas.
Are oil and gas companies tackling the
problem in the most effective way?
Most oil and gas companies organise their IT
security in a ‘Chinese wall’ approach, making
careful controls over who can gain access to
the corporate intranet, but once you’re in, you
get access to more or less everything.
There are plenty of flaws to this approach.
Once a hacker has penetrated the Chinese
wall he can do whatever he wants. And most
oil companies have trusted suppliers who are
allowed access to the intranets, and many oil
companies work closely with other oil
companies and allow each other access to
their intranets. So does this mean a supplier
of oil company A gets to access oil company
B’s intranet, although they have no direct
business relationship?
Maybe a better approach is to organise the
data around the specific process, then restrict
access to the people involved in that process.
This means more complex data tagging systems.
Oil companies are also struggling with
making sure the people using the systems are
who they say they are whilst minimising the highly
expensive and irritating experience of a security
control stopping people from doing their work.
A further challenge is how control systems
are gradually being integrated into oil
company intranets. It is one thing to have a
data flow going from the oil well to the IT
system, but if it is possible to create commands
over the IT system to turn valves remotely, this
creates the risk of hackers causing havoc much
more serious than stealing or corrupting data.
Windows is increasingly being used in
control systems and associated networks, which Keeping the gremlins out of the computers...the oil and gas industry has started discussing the complex issue
is a target for hackers. of how to improve its IT security

26 digital energy journal • April 2006


“Real challenges in the security
environment” – Mehrzad Mahdavi, global
vice president of security with
Schlumberger, and chairman of the
conference
data/knowledge management
a global plan to improve its IT security, which
he considered to be a “90 degree turn”.
“There is the plan – we will come back 2/3
years from now to tell you the result,” he said.
The new system will be tough to penetrate,
and if people do penetrate it, they will only be
able to access certain areas, because there will
be separation inside.
Total needs to allow external companies to
work within its IT firewalls, and needs to provide
its own employees with access from their
homes, offices and airports.
“We [also] have to fight against bugs, viruses
– and the worst, patches from software
vendors,” he says.
Total has 4 data centres with different levels
of security. The first challenge is classifying all of
its information as to what level of security it is,
and whether it needs extra protection (for
example encryption), he said.
Oil companies need to optimise workflow to
increase productivity, and enable people to
make decisions wherever they are;
simultaneously it has to keep these collaborative
processes secure, he said.
M Le Peuch talked about a new technology
called “Federated Identity Management” (FIM),
which enables companies to use their identity
management system in more than one different
software applications (ie log into one, you’ve
logged into them all). This also makes it easier to
share a secure system with employees from
another company. “We need to steer this
technology to the needs of our industry,” he said.

The proprietary control system software it

replaces may not have been particularly secure
but at least no-one apart from the manufacturing
company understood the code and had no way
to hack in.
“This [oil and gas industry] is a unique
business model – which carries real challenges
in the security environment,” says Mehrzad
Mahdavi, global vice president of security with
Schlumberger, and chairman of the conference.
The evening after the conference, a number
of oil industry CIOs met for dinner, in a
Schlumberger-led initiative, to discuss possibly
setting up an oil and gas industry security body,
to develop standards and systems which the
whole industry can use, which will prove
particularly helpful when companies work
together on projects and want to share secure
data between personnel in different companies.
“Classifying security level of all data” –
Philippe Chalon, chief information officer of Total
Total CIO
PHILIPPE CHALON, chief information officer
of Total, said that his company has put together
“This is the most
digitally intensive
industry,” he said. “A
subsurface project can
“Need federated identify management” –
generate over 1000 Olivier Le Peuch, president of Schlumberger
Information Solutions
terabytes. A large
Companies are already working out how to
offshore field will use this technology for two different companies
to access the same software applications, he
generate over 10 GB a said; but during 2006 to 2007, the systems
will be expanded so that industry groups can
day, with 1000 input / access the same application.
This will require a lot of cross-industry working.
output points. A large “We want to establish standards and security body
for industry,” he said. “To address governance,
refinery can have policy, compliance and privacy concerns.”
“Security is high on the agenda. We have to
30,000 input /output do it.”
points, with 1 terabyte a Donald Paul, Chevron
day of raw data“ Dr Donald L Paul, chief technology officer
Dr Donald L Paul,
of Chevron, was in no doubt about how
chief technology officer of Chevron important the issues are.
“Energy is on the mind of everyone,” he said.
“The future of energy is the future of everything
society does. Security is [also] on the mind of
everyone. The reliability and distribution of this
Olivier Le Peuch, Schlumberger critical service underpins where we’re going.”
The difficulty of IT security is increasing
Olivier Le Peuch, president of Schlumberger because the amount of data circulating is
Information Solutions, talked about making sure increasing, he said.
the security system embraces the whole “This is the most digitally intensive industry,”
process, not just the data. he said. “A subsurface project can generate
“Technology providers should develop the over 1000 terabytes. A large offshore field will
reference architecture and industry should share generate over 10 GB a day, with 1000 input
best practises,” he said. / output points. A large refinery can have
“Security is still the top IT spending priority for 30,000 input /output points, with 1 terabyte a
this industry,” he said. day of raw data.”

April 2006 • digital energy journal 27

 data/knowledge management
“the security systems themselves cause
problems” – Dr Donald L Paul, chief
technology officer of Chevron
“Chevron [altogether] has 1000 terabytes of
data, growing at 2 terabytes a day,” he said.
“There was only 5 terabytes in 1997. We get
2m e-mails a day and handle 4m transactions
a day.”
Dr Paul noted that many companies restrict the
chief information officer’s role to looking after the
corporate enterprise IT systems (such as
accounting), with someone else assigned to
handle the technical systems (such as control
systems). But the control systems create enormous
and increasing amounts of information.
“We’re on the verge of a hugely enabling
technology for performance as the world goes
to a wireless environment,” he said. “There’s a
huge surge in sensors. There are opportunities
for security and monitoring sensors.”
“The idea of big automation and control
technology to improve performance to the
level of automation we have downstream – to
bring it upstream. We’re just on the front end
of this journey.”
“The earlier the industry can get itself set to
take on these challenges the better,” he said.
“Bad things can happen to any one of us as
a result of a major event.”
“The security systems themselves cause
problems, he said. “Better defences mean more
integration complexity and enable new threats.”
“This is not a battle to be fought and won –
this is an engagement to be continued.”
“If you stay where you are, your security
declines.”
Dr Paul said that companies would have to
work together with other companies, and with
government, to improve security.
“Our only real chance is doing it together,”
he said. “The goal is to develop the systems –
the business ecology we all live in.”
“Governments and industry have
complementary capabilities. The energy
business shares a lot with the interests of
national security. We need government to set
policy frameworks which are constructive.”
Dr Paul talked about a project Chevron is
involved in, with the US Department of
28 digital energy journal • April 2006
Homeland Security, called “Linking the Oil and
Gas Industry to Improve Security” or LOGI2C.
LOGI2C will aim to “sense, correlate and
analyse cyber security threats,” he said, starting
with the 10,000 mile US pipeline network.
The US pipeline network has plenty of sensors
which communicate data and control pipeline
equipment (known as “Supervisory Control and
Data Acquisition” or SCADA), and 95 per cent
of data entry points are unmanned.
“We want to have a single network control
centre and we want to develop new types of
sensors,” he said.
The project will identify patterns of
behaviour, so that it can quickly spot if
something is slightly different.
The next step will be to include the “digital
oilfield” in the scheme, he said, and also
refineries, terminals and other monitoring
installations.
“There’s a whole lot of risks that get
embedded in the system that look about right
but aren’t,” he said. “All of this effort will help
reduce risk.”
“The big challenge is multi generational
devices,” he said.
Dr Paul said that companies should address
security as part of their cultures, like they have
learned to do with safety.
‘The four steps
were assessing risks,
holding workshops
to work out how to
reduce risks, coming
up with plans to
reduce risk, and
implementing
them‘
Ian Henderson, advisor on process control
digital security with BP
“Every company makes significant
improvement in their safety. That has happened
in 10 years,” he said. “You start by convincing
management it’s a crucial issue.”
Dr Paul said that companies could learn a
great deal from the security process, which
compensates partly from the effort involved, the
same way as they did with complying with
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).
“SOX was agony but most people would
admit they learned more about their processes,”
he said.
The most important things that Chevron did,
he said, was recognise that security was a
whole culture change, not a box to tick, and
was a process issue and not a technology
issue. “This is a journey – its not, you do it and
it’s done,” he said.
Chevron also realised it needed to have a
global security standard.
Chevron has not done anything to improve
the security of its desktop computers so far. “You
probably want to do something about that,” he
said. “The operating environment is untouched.”
“There is a need for a common mindset on
how important this is,” he said. “There is a wide
range of appetite in how people want to
participate. We have the imperative and
management onboard.”
“There needs to be mechanisms for these
activities to share and collaborate.”
BP / PA Management Systems
Ian Henderson, advisor on process control
digital security with BP, gave a joint
presentation with Justin Lowe, managing
consultant with PA Consulting Group, about
how BP has worked to improve the security of
its industrial control systems.
Many oil companies see their control systems
differently to the rest of their IT systems – but Mr
Lowe pointed out that control systems can be just
as vulnerable to hacking and problems, because
elements of them are often run using Windows
and connected to the corporate networks.
“Its almost common practise to have process
control system directly connected to a corporate
network,” Mr Lowe said.
In some oil companies, there is a lot of
mistrust between control system people and IT
people, and these needs to overcome, he said.
BP has appointed a “Company Information
Systems officer” (CISO) who is responsible for
both control systems and IT networks – any
system with ones and noughts in it.
The CISO’s role includes setting security
standards and measuring compliance against
them.
PA Consulting was contracted by BP to create
a plan to improve security, at all of BP’s 400
sites around the world, all with many different
systems; however PA Consulting did not have a
budget to send consultants to visit these sites.
PA Consulting’s approach was to create a
small “centre of excellence” where it
developed processes, tools and techniques to
improve security; it also did a lot of online
training, and adopted a “train the trainer”
approach, training people to act as security
training managers themselves.
The four steps were assessing risks, holding
workshops to work out how to reduce risks,
coming up with plans to reduce risk, and
implementing them.
When assessing risks, the approach was to

The chief information officers panel discussion – featuring CIOs of (left to right)
Chevron, Shell, Total, Occidental and Dolphin Energy
work out the vulnerability to a security incident
and the impact of a security incident. BP
started assessing the likelihood of specific
security incidents, but realised this was too
difficult, and decided instead to assume things
were going to happen.
BP took different scenarios, for example all
Microsoft software being lost (eg due to a
particularly good virus which wipes out all
Windows software across the company), or all
Unix systems being locked, and all Ethernet
infrastructure being lost, and then tried to work
out what would happen to the company if these
things occurred.
It also developed a scale of ratings as to how
secure things were, which it called “padlock
ratings,” going from 1 to 5.
BP set up a “Digital Security Alert Centre,” a
team which advises on threats to IT systems
and control systems. If something happens
which people in BP plants around the world
need to be aware of, or do something about,
they receive an e-mail with a special banner
on the top.
The security alert centre will automatically dial
up key personnel, using work phone numbers,
home phone numbers and mobile numbers, until
it gets through to someone.
BP’s Mr Henderson said that the first thing BP
does after any incident is disconnect the control
system from the network.
One of the benefits of the system was that BP
could start monitoring how long it took different
vendors to implement security software patches.
Vendors were taking between 10 and 300
days to implement patches, he said, which
subsequently reduced to 5 to 20 days when BP
was monitoring the situation.
Mr Henderson said that many security
consultancies want to do “penetration testing”,
trying to work out if they can hack into a system
as a means of testing how secure it is. This
might be sensible for normal office IT systems,
but seems very dangerous to do on control
systems, he said.
“Penetration testing of control systems can
cause a lot of danger. It fills me with dread. This
is about systems that run plant.”
data/knowledge management
Delegates at SPE’s Digital Oil and Gas Security conference tacking the tricky issue
of how to improve IT security
“Security incidents now more externally than
internally caused” – Eric Byres, research
leader at the internet security lab of British
Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT)
Eric Byres, BCIT
Eric Byres, research leader at the internet
security lab of British Columbia Institute of
Technology (BCIT), talked about a database
BCIT’s information technology is collecting of
industrial security incidents.
17 companies are contributing to the
database, from oil and gas, chemical and
power sectors, in the US, Canada, UK, France
and Australia.
Mr Byres said that the number of incidents in
the years up to 2001 was just 1-5 a year, with
most of them being accidental / caused by
disgruntled employees. From 2002 to 2005, the
majority of incidents were external (eg viruses).
BCIT found that 50 per cent of the security
incidents found ways to get through the firewall,
and 50 per cent found a way around the
firewall.
Mr Byres quoted a study which found that 80
per cent of industrial firewalls were set to allow
“any” inbound access (ie they weren’t any use at
all). Very few firewalls were set optimally.
Mr Byres said that there were hackers who
were interested in learning about control systems.
April 2006 • digital energy journal
“You can’t just buy a process control firewall
and forget about it,” he said. “There are a lot of
different ways into a SCADA system. Just
digging a moat around the control system is no
longer enough.”
Mr Byres said that the normal approach to
improving security of IT systems is to work out
where the vulnerabilities are then make patches;
but this does not work so well with control
systems, which have hard installed software.
A ping sweep, another standard method for
identifying vulnerabilities (by sending small
packets of data to lots of network addresses and
seeing what happens) can be very dangerous
practise on control systems. In one case, Mr
Byres said, a ping sweep caused a robotic arm
on a piece of plant to swing by 9 feet at high
speed, which could have killed someone if they
were in the way.
“We were against scanning and looking for
vulnerabilities,” he said.
CIO Panel
A chief information officer’s panel was held at
Digital Oil and Gas Security event in London,
featuring Arjen Dorland, CIO Global Functions,
Royal Dutch Shell; Don Moore, Vice President
and CIO, Occidental Petroleum Corporation;
Ibrahim Lary, VP IT and Automation, Dolphin
Energy; Mike Reddy, CIO, Chevron International
E+P; and Philippe Chalon, CIO of Total.
Don Moore, Occidental
Don Moore, vice president and CIO of
Occidental, said that the most challenging
thing for him is making sure that any disruptions
would have minimal impact, and the company
would recover very quickly.
Occidental learned a great deal about its
disaster recovery plans after Hurricane Rita, he
said. “We found out – you don’t know how
good your plans are until you have a problem.”
The company faced more problems when
Houston was faced with a hurricane threat
immediately after New Orleans, and people
29
 data/knowledge management
“Learned a great deal about disaster recovery
after Rita” – Don Moore, vice president and CIO
of Occidental
started evacuating because they had seen what
had happened.
“When the city of Houston started shutting
down – we learned a lot about security and
business continuance,” he said. “Our business
continuity didn’t work very well at all.”
“The City of Houston was scared to death –
all they could think about was what happened
in New Orleans.”
Occidental found itself moving data out of
Houston by truck. “It took 27 hours to drive from
Dallas to Houston,” he said.
Other issues which concerned him were
protecting intellectual property (making sure that
confidential data is kept confidential). “You
need to manage your IP. You want to keep
certain data only with the company,” he said.
Making sure all data is kept secret is almost
impossible though, with many issues to be
addressed, such as employees copying data
onto USB memory sticks which are easily lost,
or even just printing out their e-mails.
“We haven’t figured that out yet,” he said.
“We have more data moving around unofficially
than officially.”
Another problem is staff causing problems
with the IT network, including downloading
freeware software
“We had a problem recently – someone
came in to the company to do some advertising
and set up their own LAN, with their own IP
addresses,” he said.
Mr Moore said that Occidental has worked
out a standard set of security rules, which it
applies to plant security, physical security and
the PC desktop.
Deleting data can be difficult, he said. “There
are times when we want data removed.
Making sure its not there can be as hard as
making sure its there.”
Arjen Dorland, Shell
Arjen Dorland, vice president and CIO
global functions, Royal Dutch Shell, said that
security is well understood and supported at the
top levels of Shell.
“While we have implemented a trusted
30 digital energy journal • April 2006
environment for the group, we believe in
constantly reviewing the effectiveness of our
response through internal and external reviews,”
he said.
Shell has a combination of a perimeter and
device-based approach to security, he said,
where the company makes it very hard for
outsiders to get into its IT system.
However, Shell does not believe that this type of
security system will be adequate in the future. It is
developing identity management systems, where
different people are recognised by the system and
given access different data resources accordingly.
“In Shell, we believe information security is
everybody’s responsibility, and we take a serious
view of any employee actions that do not conform
to our security procedures,” he said.
“At the same time we are actively enhancing
security awareness and behaviour for all,
including modules on handling most confidential
information and dealing with third parties.”
Convincing both employees and management
to accept tougher security measures is a tough
challenge. The key lies in clearly explaining the
risks and benefits.
Shell requires all of its employees to take
online IT security training, if they don’t they
lose their network connection until they
complete the training.
In Shell, the vice president information security
and the vice president physical security (corporate
affairs) are at the same level in the organisation.
The vice president information security reports to
the chief information officer and information
security is organised across the Shell businesses in
line with the IT structure.
The vice president corporate affairs (physical)
security reports to the director of corporate affairs
and physical security has a regional
organisational structure. However, information
security and physical security come together to
work together in shared areas.
Ibrahmim Lary, Dolphin
Dolphin Energy is
a gas company 5
years old based in the
United Arab Emirates,
which is majority
owned by the
Mubadala
Development
Company, owned by
the government of Abu
“Problem of unstructured
Dhabi, and 24 per
data flows” – Mike cent owned by both Total
Reddy, CIO, Chevron and Occidental. It
International E&P
produces, processes and
transports natural gas from Qatar’s North Field to
the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
The company does not separate its information
technology and automation systems as many oil
companies do, but manages them under the
same division. It has a “decision control system”
(DCS) with 200 Windows servers.
“We are working to make the most
automated and effective company possible,”
says Ibrahim Lary, VP IT and Automation,
Dolphin Energy.
Mike Reddy, Chevron
Mike Reddy, chief information officer of
Chevron, talked about the challenges of
making sure the right people can get the right
information, but the wrong people are
blocked out.
“Figuring out how to do that without excessive
administration is something we’re struggling
with,” he said.
The company has a joint venture with Kuwait
Oil Company, which means that some of its
employees need to see some of Chevron’s data;
but Chevron did not want to give all of Kuwait
Oil Company’s 500 employees access to all of
Chevron’s systems.
Chevron manages its risk by analysing how
vulnerable different things are and how critical
they are, he said.
Mr Reddy said that data can be limited to
specific groups of employees, rather than
shared with the whole company. “There’s lots of
data you wouldn’t want outside your
workgroup,” he said.
Mr Reddy addressed the difficulties of
controlling which data goes where.
“Unstructured data flows are very large, with e-
mails being the biggest one,” he said.
Chevron requires all of its employees to take
a security awareness training module every
year, on their computers, he said.
Chevron is trying to gradually change its
approach to IT, from looking at it in terms of
infrastructure to looking at it in terms of
applications standards and models, which enable
data to move easily around the company.
“The real value is enabling us to access
and review data,” he said. “As we try to
change IT we’re looking for opportunities in
all of these areas.”
For example, Chevron could connect its
personnel (hiring and recruitment) IT systems to
training systems, so people could be sent on the
right courses. It could also connect its personnel
system to the maintenance system, so the
maintenance system could fire off work orders to
the right people.
“Its getting that everything is moving to being
integrated – it’s what we want from a business
sense,” he said.
One of the biggest IT projects he had
handled, he said, was merging two computer
systems together when Chevron merged with
Texaco. “We had 14 separate projects tied up
in one mega project,” he said.
Who manages control systems IT
An interesting question was raised as to
how companies manage control system security.
In Chevron, the IT management have
responsibility for the security of the control
systems downstream; the upstream control

systems are looked after by the operations
department. Total does it the same way,
delegates heard.
In Dolphin Energy, the chief information officer
looks after all of the control systems, because IT
and automation departments have been merged.
Monitoring e-mails
The CIOs did not have a ready answer to a
question posed to the panel by Donald L Paul,
chief technology officer of Chevron, about
whether they thought monitoring employees
e-mails was a good idea.
Philippe Chalon, chief information officer of
Total, said that under French law a company is
not allowed to open an employee’s e-mail, but
it is hard to reconcile this with a requirement
for the company to protect its data and
intellectual property.
Arjen Dorland, CIO Global Functions, Royal
Dutch Shell, said that the company has active
monitoring of employee e-mails but only
monitoring certain events. “We will keep certain
e-mails much longer than we have in the past,”
he said.
Identity management
Speakers from Chevron and Shell also
talked about how they manage people, or
“identities” on their IT systems, making sure that
data/knowledge management
“Its getting that
everything is moving to
being integrated – it’s
what we want from a
business sense”
Mike Reddy,
chief information officer of Chevron
the right people can access the right information.
Edmund Yee, strategic research manager in
Chevron, said that the company currently
manages 90,000 identifications (IDs), including
IDs for individual users, administrators, devices
and applications.
Chevron employees can use the identification
system to access the corporate network from
remote computers, including handheld
computers using Citrix. “We wanted common ID
card to access all locations,” he said.
Chevron also wanted to reduce the helpdesk
costs. “We do 3,000 password resets a
month,” he said.
The employees are issued with a physical
card, which has a photo of them on it; they
have to put into a slot on their office computers,
and wear as an identification badge.
By making the card double up as a corporate
IT card, people treat it more carefully and are
less likely to forget it, lose it, or walk away from
the computer leaving it in the slot.
If they lose their badge, they can have a
short-term temporary card; they have to arrange
for it to be activated by calling the help desk,
after answering a series of questions. “We’re
going with temporary cards but we’re not
happy with it,” he said.
Chevron is looking at biometrics
authentication for “special purposes,” he said.
Ken Mann, Shell
At Shell, it is not possible to connect a PC to
the network without tests being made that it has
anti-virus and a firewall installed with patches
up to date, said Ken Mann, global infrastructure
security architect with Shell Services.
The company has a system to automatically
encrypt any data that an employee wants to
store on a USB device, so it can only be read
on a Shell computer.
The company recently brought in plans to try
to reduce the cost of managing desktop
computers by 50 per cent, including hardware,
software, operations, helpdesk and the network.
For managing user identities among its
120,000 users, it developed a system with
Schlumberger (which Schlumberger is now
selling as a commercial product). Q

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April 2006 • digital energy journal 31

 computing
HP and digital
oil field
Servers and software giant
HP says it is being
approached by many oil and
gas companies asking how it
can apply IT techniques
developed for other industries
to oil and gas. Here are
some suggestions
“W
e are increasingly
finding that oil
and gas
companies are
looking outside of their own industry for
inspiration in addressing some of the challenges
faced in reducing cost and improving
efficiency,” says Paul Helm, upstream manager
world wide oil and gas, HP.
There are obvious analogies being drawn
between engineering, procurement and
construction and their equivalents in aerospace
and shipbuilding.
But oil and gas companies are also looking
at other collaborative product development
environments, such as automobile and hi-tech
manufacturing, and finding out how HP
products developed there can be used in the oil
and gas industry.
HP has videoconferencing technology with delays
(latency) very much reduced, enabling people to have
something which feels close to a normal conversation
although they are on different sides of the world
32 digital energy journal • April 2006
“Collaborative product development and
support provided through PLM – Product
Lifecycle Management – is another area of
significant interest in the oil and gas patch for
reducing construction costs, overruns and
specification mismatches,” he says.
“Another cross industry discipline finding a
receptive audience is the use of collaboration
technologies for support of supply chain
operations, providing end to end visibility of
component status and location – often backed
by technologies HP itself has successfully
implemented – RFID for example.”
“Internally, as our customers drive to reduce
the number of field based personnel – either as
an efficiency measure or in response to
demographic changes, the desire to implement
common operating workflows across business
units is leading to interest in benchmarking and
real-time KPI measurement,” he says.”
OpenView
HP produces the OpenView suite of
management software tools, which can be
used to manage all aspects of the business.
“You need a centralised console which shows
you how your E&P workflows are working. You
want real time information that tells you where
the bottlenecks are, what the impact of that is,”
he says.
“We’re taking the OpenView Business
Process Insight toolset used to great effect in HP
and with customers to instrument process and so
give visibility of commercial impact of inefficient
process,” he says.
“The upside is not only a spreadsheet win
[benefit over using Excel spreadsheets] but with
process and workflow standardization the
potential exists for increased flexibility of
workforce.
“Another area where workflow monitoring is
important is in checking up on maintenance
support. If I have a sensor on the compressor
indicating that there’s a problem, I want the field
maintenance engineer to turn-up within a
designated 3 hour window – and follow
process to comply with HSE and operational
standards,” he says.
“The operator needs to be able to monitor the
situation and know when the standards deviate
from the norm.”
OpenView can be used to manage the
communication and computational infrastructure
used in bringing monitoring equipment data,
from oil wells, pipelines, processing plant into
the corporate IT network so extending IT
governance discipline to what was previously a
technical networked environment.
The criticality of right-time data availability
has many immediate and future benefits.
Mr. Helm imagines that oil companies could
do a lot with having their data more integrated
through the company - for example, linking
production rates to the trading floor to identify
when potential shortfall in production would
drive a buy response on the open market
whereas a corresponding overproduction would
allow the traders to dispose of excess.
This level of commercial responsiveness needs
an assured available infrastructure.
Communications
On the communications side, many oil and
gas companies have shown interest in HP’s
“HALO” telepresence videoconferencing with
extremely low latency [time for data
transmission].
“For those who have experienced HALO the
technology quickly becomes transparent and the
effect of telepresence really does make you feel
you’re in the same room,” he says.
“We’ve seen considerable interest in
deploying HALO as an executive collaboration
tool and have conducted true real-time meetings
between Houston and London one minute and
quickly transitioning to Singapore to London in
the next,” he says.
“Our customers also see HALO as a crisis
management tool, instant face to face meetings
across the globe in response to environmental,
political or even economic events.
Fast processing
HP is already well established providing
computers for the oil and gas industry which can
process fast enough to handle 4D seismic data.
4D seismic data, which shows how seismic
readings in all 3 dimensions changes over time,
requires about 10 times more processing than
static 3D seismic information, particularly with
all of the algorithms. There is also a high data
communications requirement.
Dagang Orient Geophysical Research
Institute, China’s largest geophysical exploration
company, recently installed what is thought to
be the world’s largest high performance

Paul Helm,
upstream
manager
world
wide oil
and gas,
hp
computing (HPC) cluster in the oil and gas
industry with 119 32-bit HP blade servers as
computer nodes; 14 HP servers as input /output
nodes; and a further 131 nodes and 262
processing units (CPUs) for processing the data.
It used HP’s Insight Manager and ProCurve
Manager for cluster monitoring and HP Cluster
Management Utility for cluster management.
These servers had higher availability,
scalability, manageability and performance
than the previous Unix parallel processing
system, HP says.
The cluster can process 12,000 km of 2D
data, 6,000km2 of 3D data, and 3,000 km2
per year of pre-stack migration processing. The
system was installed in 3 days, by cloning one
disk to another.
The entire system can be managed remotely,
without anyone having to go to the computer
centre.
Another project HP provided supercomputing
power for Abu Dhabi Marine Operating
Company, for running the Schlumberger Eclipse
reservoir modeling software. The company
moved from its traditional UNIX platforms to 64-
bit Red Hat Linux systems, running on a cluster
of 24 HP Itanium-2 servers.
Sensors and networks
HP is helping oil companies manage the
enormous number of sensors and other
components on their networks.
“An oil company asked us, could you
manage one million IP addresses,” he says.
“We looked into this and with our extensive
experience in managing telecommunications
networks we knew this was a capability we
could bring to the market for Oil and Gas. The
result is the application of the OpenView
management suite as an Oilfield IT Infrastructure
Management Tool.”
“To give some idea of the scale and scope of
the problem, another oil company told us that
they had 14,000 IP devices in the field - each
has a password for administrator - we don’t
know what any of them are,” he says.
We also learned that the operating system
version, security patches applied and
application releases installed were an unknown.
“Given the current intense focus on field
computing
network security, the basics offered in traditional
IT can be applied to great effect” he says.
RFID
One area RFID can help is monitoring the
supply chain. RFID can add value by helping
oil companies reduce inventory levels, make
sure they never run out of anything, and
respond quicker if they do. “You can put a
tag on the device to identify it, scan the tag –
it tells me what that device is at a given time”
he says.
“We know of many examples where our
customers are looking to solve inventory or
supply chain problems with RFID. One client
had issues with several million dollars worth of
inventory sitting on a dock side in Singapore
with no way of knowing anything about it’s
state, location or usability”.
“RFID alone wouldn’t fix this problem, but as
a tool linked to adequate inventory
management the potential for savings could be
realized. A rule of thumb – apply a
depreciation rate of 1% per day to the value if
inventory and you can see where such
technology would be beneficial”
“We’ve also looked into the use of RFID in a
track and trace scenario, the ability to track
pipe of a given specification, or locate spare
proppant for a frac-n-pac job to reduce non-
productive time in workovers are real examples
of the use of this technology.” Q

Intel, Dell and Schlumberger Petrobras signs for Halliburton

develop oil and gas software and IT services
workstation
Intel Corporation announced plans to work
together with Dell and Schlumberger to
develop a new workstation computer platform
specifically for the oil and gas industry,
bringing together the core strengths of the
three companies.
Schlumberger will bring an intimate knowledge of the
exploration and production environments and customer needs.
Dell will make high performance precision workstations.]Intel
will provide architecture to make systems with improved
performance and memory capacity.
The resulting system should have superior data throughput,
computer performance and graphical performance. “Our
customers are continually pushing the limits of existing
workstations,” says Ihab Toma, Schlumberger Information
Solutions vice president of sales and marketing. “Working with
Intel and Dell through their development lifecycle to deliver a
new, high-performance workstation will ensure that our clients
are able to realize the full potential of our latest software
solutions and to make faster, more accurate, decisions.”
“Together with Schlumberger, a recognized leader in the
industry, Intel and Dell are able to understand the requirements
dictated in a comprehensive seismic-to-simulation workflow,”
says Intel. Q
Brazilian oil company Petrobras has awarded a two year
“multimillion dollar” contract with Landmark (the IT division of
Halliburton) for a full range of software and IT services.
Petrobras has signed a special contract with Landmark, whereby Landmark sets
fixed prices for specific goods and services and Petrobras commits to a minimum
spend for the duration of the contract. This should make it easier for Petrobras staff
to gain access to Landmark technology and services, and the whole contract can
be settled in just one invoice. Q
Cobalt outsources IT infrastructure
Start-up oil and gas E&P company Cobalt International Energy
has outsourced its IT infrastructure to Landmark (part of
Halliburton) under a 3-year contract.
Landmark will provide what it describes as a “virtual technical workplace,”
providing business critical data and applications for workers. The infrastructure
platform is provided by HP.
Cobalt believes that the contract will enable personnel to focus on oil and gas
exploration rather than information technology, and the system will be easily
scaleable as the company grows. Cobalt says that the system was fully functional
just one week after agreeing the contract, enabling staff to get on with their work of
interpreting data and looking for prospects. Q

April 2006 • digital energy journal 33