Insight: Raising the game for oil & gas data..

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

The oil and gas industry’s IT systems could be better at working with real time data, managing new data types and providing analytics, says Jay Hollingsworth, director of oil and gas with Oracle.

The oil and gas industry’s IT systems are not able to handle many new data types, don’t connect real time and static data well, and don’t allow very good real time analytics of drilling data, said Jay Hollingsworth, director of oil and gas with Oracle, speaking at the Digital Energy Journal March 13^th conference in Aberdeen on developments with subsurface data. “When you talk about industry challenges with IT people, they are all surprised that we have some of these problems,” he said.

Big data

Big data is a fairly new technology term, which means a specific type of data, where the value is found from the analytics, not individual components of data. In this way, a list of bank transactions, where every piece is valuable, would not be considered ‘big data’, but a database of online purchases used to work out what someone might like to purchase next, would be.

An example of big data would be a stream of temperature data from a well. Each individual reading is not worth so much, but by analysing how the temperature changes over a long period, you could get useful information, such as which factors cause the temperatures to change.

Oil and gas companies often reduce the temperature data to a reading every hour to make the data volumes easier to manage, but in doing so lose a lot of the value. “A surveillance engineer could make use of high rate data but he typically doesn't have that available,” he said.

Big data typically has lots of varieties, including structured data (databases), unstructured data (documents), and something in between, for example when a report has fields in it which contain free text.

For the full article, please go to the latest edition of Digital Energy Journal


Printer / smartphone friendly version

Most Read News