Abstract
Today's oil & gas companies are struggling to meet the world's growing demand for energy. Oil & gas installations are getting ever more complex. New production capacity must be brought on line in ever-shorter timescales. More and more data is being created, bringing with it the challenges of how to access, share and control this information ‘mammoth’.
The cost of down time, whether planned or unplanned, rises with the oil price; production facilities require continual modification to extract more oil from depleting reservoirs, while squeezing more output from ageing downstream plant can incur operational and safety risks. There has never been greater need for better exploitation of the information embodied in oil & gas assets.
A number of factors have increased the information mammoth challenge:
The increased volume and diversity of available information. IT advances have made it ever easier to create data; more and more applications and systems generate more and more data. Plants typically use many different, incompatible applications, so the information within them is effectively locked up in ‘silos’ – disconnected data formats that simply don't communicate with each other or make themselves universally available, and which are never uniformly updated.
A stricter regulatory environment. This brings an increased need to audit business processes for compliance, and to be able to produce, at a moment's notice, reports, drawings, diagrams and other data to satisfy regulatory assessors' ever-growing demands.
The continued trend towards larger multi-partner, multi-contractor and -subcontractor projects. How can data be shared from the very start? How can we make sure that data is updated correctly and that everyone has access to the right data at the right time? In short, how do we control the creation and dissemination of data?
A change in demographics, leading to a shortage of skilled and experienced staff. Enormous experience and knowledge are locked away within a dwindling pool of highly skilled engineers. How can we unlock that experience and make it available to new trainees?
