To make the next leap in performance that our customers need to deliver energy in today’s competitive environment, we are developing and using digital solutions—focused on generating richer data and better insights—that will achieve performance not previously possible across the E&P industry.
While the industry is discussing how digital will usher in a new era, Schlumberger has been building the digital technology for the future. We are leveraging technologies that have transformed other industries by applying them in E&P, enabling our customers to make better decisions and make them faster.
Our industry faces a new landscape. Geopolitical uncertainty and trade concerns are amplifying the trend toward more localized hydrocarbon supply and demand dynamics in the world’s producing basins. Activity cycles of the major producing regions are decoupling and each region is becoming more volatile and dynamic. As a result, the major producing regions are increasingly competing against each other for market access to meet global, regional, and domestic oil and gas demand.
Simultaneously, there is a growing level of scrutiny on the environmental and social impacts of energy production in tandem with increased focus by investors on capital discipline and financial returns. Despite these factors, the oil and gas industry will still be called on to deliver more than half of global energy needs for the foreseeable future. To deliver affordable energy sustainably, our customers must achieve higher levels of performance.
While digitally enabled experiences based on access to richer data are now mainstream in industries such as retail and financial services, upstream oil and gas has only just begun to harness the power of digital capabilities to drive industry performance.
Digital makes it possible for people to perform more efficiently and maximize resources, enabling them to do more. Rapid and secure data flows enhance team collaboration and reduce the time needed to make better informed decisions, leading to increased asset value for our customers. Emerging solutions are helping the industry overcome its technical challenges while addressing stakeholders’ environmental and sustainability goals.
However, integrating digital technology into E&P workflows requires extensive domain expertise about upstream hardware and software technologies and the vast amounts of subsurface and production data acquired.
For Schlumberger, leading the digital transformation of the energy industry requires applying its operational track record and domain expertise—particularly in subsurface measurement—to every facet of the E&P life cycle.
By partnering with leading digital companies, Schlumberger has accelerated its investment in digital upstream technology along three highly interconnected dimensions.
The first dimension of digital enablement is data. Data is the essence of all our workflows—it is the lifeblood of our industry, it permeates everything we do. As such, it represents a competitive edge for all operators.
Although vast amounts of data are produced every day, little of it is consumed, processed, or used to develop insights to improve operational performance. In light of advances in data science and analytics and the benefits many industries have already derived from digital transformation, the opportunity for the E&P industry is immense.
Because data is the foundation of performance impact, Schlumberger’s journey to the digital future started by developing the DELFI environment, which was released in 2017 and includes a robust, secure data ecosystem specifically optimized for E&P applications. The DELFI environment is a scalable and open cloud-based software environment that enables seamless E&P workflows across exploration, development, drilling, and production through to midstream.
We made the DELFI environment’s data ecosystem open to foster collaboration across teams in ways that were not previously possible. The future must be open to unlock the potential of digital to revolutionize this industry and create the next step change in organizational and operational performance. At the SIS Global Forum 2019, we announced the open-sourcing of the DELFI environment’s data ecosystem and its contribution to The Open Group OSDU Forum. This technology collaboration with the OSDU Forum is an industry first—it reinforces our vision of driving E&P industry performance by leveraging a cross-industry community working toward data standards and best practices. Together, we will revolutionize E&P workflows from traditional ways of working by bringing them into the digital future.
Our recently launched GAIA platform is an example of how data—collected and used in new, digitally enabled ways—can lead to making better decisions and making them faster. Built in the DELFI environment, the GAIA platform seamlessly brings together data from diverse sources to equip explorationists to accelerate screening and ranking of opportunities. The GAIA platform is open and provides access to many data types, from terabytes of seismic data and well and production logs to news and market reports from multiple content providers across the E&P life cycle. The latest partner to join the platform is IHS Markit, providing access to proprietary E&P datasets that complement customers’ own datasets used to create an earth model during exploration analysis and planning.
“The DELFI environment is helping customers transform their workflows. By removing silos and barriers, people and teams can seamlessly share information.”
Cloud applications and workflows are the second dimension of digital enablement that equips us to rethink collaboration across the entire E&P life cycle. The DELFI environment is helping customers transform their workflows. By removing silos and barriers, people and teams can seamlessly share information. More efficient collaboration across teams generates actionable insights more quickly. More than one hundred E&P companies are now using the DELFI environment to develop their own digitally enabled workflows to improve their performance.
Since the launch of the DELFI environment and its native DrillPlan* coherent well construction planning solution in 2017, we have commercialized applications spanning exploration to production—ExplorePlan* accelerated exploration planning solution, FDPlan* agile field development planning solution, DrillOps* on-target well delivery solution, and ProdOps* tuned production operations solution. Each of these applications helps customers reduce the time and resources it takes to plan individual wells or a field and then optimize drilling and production from those assets. Since 2018, more than 2,700 wells have been planned with the DrillPlan solution, increasing well-planning efficiency by 50%. Similarly, the FDPlan solution is expected to reduce the simulation time for field development planning from days to hours or even minutes and improve data gathering time by at least 50%.
By taking digital to the edge—into the field, beyond the back office and the cloud—we expect to achieve even greater performance impact. Further, opportunities to boost performance exist at the edge, where we are now enabling real-time actions based on equipment-level data and embedding automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in our field tools and equipment.
The third dimension is edge-of-network computing in the field, where operations data is generated. Edge computing and analytics enable automation and close the loop between the hardware and software systems, delivering a step change in safety, efficiency, and automation. By analyzing drilling, production, and processing operations data in the field, customers are benefiting sooner from actionable insights and achieving better outcomes, driving improved performance.
In the Permian Basin, oil and gas wells are currently being planned and drilled using our DrillPlan and DrillOps solutions. These digital solutions are helping to drill wells safer, faster, and with repeatably higher reservoir contact.
On the horizon, we envisage fully automated rigs drilling wells to their target, just as autonomous vehicles will go from point to point adjusting for unpredictable circumstances. Every trip will be the safest, most reliable, and most efficient way to get to target. We have the talent pool with unique domain expertise and a digital partner ecosystem—like no one else in our industry—to lead in this digital drilling future.
The adoption of digital technology is also improving onshore production operations, which are typically characterized by manual tasks performed on diverse field equipment over a wide area. In response, Agora® edge Internet of Things (IoT) solutions provides an edge computing and analytics platform to securely connect field devices, enabling customers to take remote action or fully automate equipment based on actionable insights.
Early adopters of Agora solutions in North America land have benefited from reduced production-disrupting electrical submersible pump (ESP) downtime through timely alerts and by performing corrective actions remotely. In addition, remote actions have helped decrease wellsite visits and total miles driven, significantly improving safety and environmental performance and profitability.
For these three dimensions, a new generation of integrated systems that leverage digital technology by design is emerging. These new systems, which integrate hardware and software, provide superior performance and facilitate plug-and-play functionality through their digital platforms and innovative workflows.
For example, the Ora intelligent wireline formation testing platform unites hardware and laboratory-accurate downhole measurement capability with a software structure to achieve dynamic reservoir characterization in all conditions—even where previously not possible. The cloud-native collaborative software powers intelligent planning and operations control using wellsite automation. The Ora platform puts customers in control of data acquisition and provides actionable insights for real-time decision making.
Integrated digital systems hold the promise of notable performance improvement for our industry. Within Schlumberger, our teams of data scientists and domain experts at all of our digital technology centers are creating solutions that embed machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies within our hardware. One example is automated wellbore log quality control at basin scale for North America unconventional reservoirs, which improves reservoir characterization efficiency.
Automation is another major step to enhance E&P industry performance. Through the Sensia joint venture between Schlumberger and Rockwell Automation, customers benefit from measurement solutions, production domain expertise, and automation from the oil and gas industry’s most integrated provider. Sensia’s technology portfolio will improve oilfield operations, facilitate decisions, and reduce total cost of ownership throughout the life of a field.
Creating digital systems requires a clear digital strategy, targeted investment, and the right talent. Schlumberger has for decades pioneered the use of information technology and software to increase the productivity of geoscientists and engineers as we continually invest in the digital knowledge of our technical community. Digital is part of our DNA. Now we must aim for the next level by unlocking digital collaboration and productivity in cross-domain workflows and applications.
Adoption of these new digitally enabled workflows requires a focus on change management because they markedly transform traditional practices. In addition, the people adopting these workflows need increasing levels of digital proficiency.
Schlumberger started this journey years ago, and today has an established global network of technical resources through the consistent recruiting of talent with digital skills and reskilling the existing workforce in emerging digital technologies. Schlumberger’s long-standing ability to source talent globally enables us to compete for this scarce digital talent pool.
Our industry will significantly benefit from increased performance across the E&P landscape. Performance will make our industry more competitive and more resilient as we continue delivering affordable energy to meet the world’s needs.
We have a unique opportunity to regain our industry’s attractiveness to a broad range of stakeholders and to be a high-performing sector through the energy transition. Digitally enabled performance drives efficiency sustainably and with responsibility to all our stakeholders, the environment, and the communities where we live and work—in essence, making possible a future in which performance supports a better, cleaner, and safer industry.
Digital technology will enable us to achieve the next leap in performance across the entire E&P value chain.
Together with our customers and technology partners, Schlumberger is leading the industry’s digital journey to deliver high performance sustainably for the benefit of all.
