Oil & Gas Industry

Help shape the future of OMG standards

Oil & Gas Industry

Oil & Gas operators and service companies started accumulating wireline logging data decades ago; the amount of data being acquired has grown exponentially with the development of seismic surveys, measurement while drilling, and with the “digital oilfield” revolution in which operators increasingly add sensors inside producing wells. The ongoing research on digital energy highlights the tremendous potential for improved operations through exploitation of these massive amounts of data; yet, until now, there has been little incentive for sharing that data among industry players, and much concern about confidentiality issues. Little has been done since the adoption of the WITSML standard for representation of wireline data.

In recent years, the Upstream Oil & Gas industry has begun to realize – especially when analyzing the root causes of safety incidents – that the lack of integration and interchange methods and standards has potentially dire consequences. Not only would sharing information create better predictive models and impact real-time operational decisions in a beneficial way, for example during drilling, but hoarding information can also damage a company’s image in the eyes of the public and the legislators, ultimately threatening the “right to operate.”

The Upstream Oil & Gas industry has much to gain from learning about the extensive body of work done on process and information modeling and exchange in other domains. OMG proposes a viable framework to discuss and understand the industry’s needs and challenges: an industry-specific Task Force can be created and cross-pollinated from the efforts of other OMG subgroups.

In particular, the experience of the healthcare and finance industries in dealing with an increasingly regulated context should be beneficial to the O&G industry as it faces mounting constraints from governments worldwide. Like all highly competitive industries, Oil & Gas companies need to keep certain aspects of their business confidential. But when it comes to developing better and safer ways to operate, the industry must find secure ways to combine industry-wide data to enable better decision-making, using broadly accepted standards and models. The work of OMG over the last 25 years has paved the road toward this goal.

 

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