Industry-wide Challenges
The ultimate goal of the E&P industry is to provide energy resources to the world. Some of the key challenges that E&P businesses face include:
- Increased pressure for operators to maximize recovery and replace reserves in the face of still-strong worldwide energy demand forecasts.
- Huge growth in expenses, uncertainty, and risk due to remote geographic locations and technically complex and unconventional plays.
- Urgent need to bridge workforce shortages and experience gaps with technology solutions as senior petro-technical professionals retire in record numbers and a new, less-experienced work force climbs the learning curve.
- Exponential growth in the volume of available data and difficulty in managing and using all that data to realize value.
Digital oilfield Challenges
Digital Oilfield (DOF) technology and solutions—the broad range of “intelligent” field instrumentation, equipment and computer hardware and software implemented along the E&P value chain—has the potential to help businesses address these challenges.
However, a key barrier to full implementation and realization of DOF value is incompatible data formats. The various technologies and systems along the value chain are proprietary solutions made by different vendors, service companies, and operators with different, often proprietary, data formats. Also, different systems used by multiple stakeholders in a project—service companies, operators, partners, and regulatory agencies—use different data formats.
The need to reformat data as it moves along the value chain or between stakeholders is inefficient, error-prone, and costly.
To find out how to overcome these challenges, see Solution: Standards.