Albert Boulanger, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Roger Anderson, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
James Barger, BBN Systems & Technologies
For the past twenty years or so, many of the major technological innovations in the oil and gas industry have come from what is often termed the "far field", and particularly from the electronics and computational industries. Three major centers of creativity have driven world science and engineering invention in these disciplines: the military, medicine and pharmaceuticals, and consumer electronics. Each is among the few human endeavors that is larger, more profitable, and has quicker innovation-to-product cycle-time than the oil industry. These far-field industries are distinguishable from the oil industry in a profound way, however: They spend 20-30% of their gross margins on research and development, whereas the oil industry reinvests 5%, at best.
Figure 1. Technology makes the oil and gas visible.
This means that we can likely get a perceptive view of the look and feel of the oil and gas industry of the future by looking at where these far-field industries are today. Consider, for example, the origins of one of the oil industry's major technological breakthroughs of the 1990's, horizontal drilling. Where did the discovery begin that eventually allowed us to steer our drillbits pretty much wherever we want in the subsurface? Unquestionably, they originated in the military-industrial complex, and specifically, in target-accuracy research and development. The inertial navigation systems for missiles ended up in our bottom-hole assemblies!
One distinct innovation from the medical profession that has been introduced into the oil business is the migration of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) into the wireline logging business. The added information from the precessing of hydrogen atoms within pore fluids has dramatically improved our formation evaluation capabilities, particularly in low-resistivity pay intervals. These MRI logging tools have greatly improved our ability to distinguish movable hydrocarbons from water and brine.
And we all know that consumer electronics has driven the decentralization of computation in our industry: first to the desktop, and now ironically, to distributed and networked computation that has begun to resemble the spoke-and-node architecture of the old main-frame days, albeit at orders-of-magnitude greater speed and flexibility. In fact, this category has benefited from synergy from all three disciplines: the high end of supercomputing, or what's fondly called "heavy iron," was driven by the military, desktop workstations were driven by medical and scientific research needs, and networking, though invented by the military, became a household word with the invention of the WorldWideWeb.
Figure 2. The Network Force hunting submarines.
We are currently taking advantage of discoveries made in the 1970's in the military, the 1980's in medicine and pharmaceuticals, and in the early 1990's in consumer electronics. These varying time windows for technology transfer are attributable to both security and complexity issues, and both have eased in the late 1990's.
In this article, we will make the foolish attempt to paint a picture
of the management of the oil fields of the future. Of course,
we will not be right, but we venture to speculate that we will
be close because our thoughts are founded in working, in-place
technologies of the present far-field industries.
The oil field of the future will be visualized in three-dimensions at remote monitoring sites. Right now, the transition from 3D seismic to 4D, or time-dependent seismic imaging is beginning to allow us to not only describe what the reservoir/fault/stratigraphy of a field looks like, but also how the oil, gas and water are moving in response to drainage into wellbores. It's as if we are becoming able to makes the surface rock transparent to the geologist, geophysicist and engineers' gaze (Figure 1).
Figure 3. The BBN Network Operations Center (NOC) routing Internet traffic.
We will be able to peer into the subsurface, but in the miniature, virtual space of a computer workstation or workroom. Workstations, massively parallel supercomputers, and real 3D visualization are driving these innovations. And we will be creating these images from new sensors at the surface and buried within our boreholes themselves. For example, antisubmarine warfare has produced cheap, easy to install, self-locating, seismic listening arrays, and more importantly, phased-array seismic sources that can aim a wideband and coherent waveform at a specific object in the subsurface (Figure 2). Focusing these waveforms to a 30-degree "ensonification cone" is possible today with U.S. Navy technology. These innovations have not yet made it to the oil industry, but when they do, they will allow for cheap, routine, 4D seismic reacquisition of trouble spots within fields as production problems appear.
These sensors connect to satellite, cellular and portable fiber-optic networks to give the oil industry an economic reason to institute a command-and-control. We will be able to increase "quality control" over the removal of the oil and gas assets from the ground. Such control centers are a routine part of the refining business, but upstream, they are only found in hurricane monitoring and control centers of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico gas and oil industry operators. The tracking of drainage efficiency, the instant detection and response to water coning and production anomalies, and the management of flow mixes versus spot prices will provide economic incentives to establish central command centers like those in other industries (Figure 3).
Figure 4. Command-and-control network of mixed services in
the U.S. Military.
Of course, the most famous of these command centers is at NASA-Houston in their mission control rooms. More than thirty years ago, it was realized that we could not possibly send a man to the moon without such a centralized, but broadly distributed information network. Remember the shock when NASA announced that the site would be Houston, more than a thousand miles from the centers of development and launch in California and Florida. NASA knew it was doable because the military was already operating out of a mountain in Colorado.
The U.S. military is in significant transition. The Cold War is
over, we hope forever, and the military role of United States
forces is changing profoundly. Rapid strike, security and policing
are replacing what was a "mass and maneuver" doctrine
of the nuclear age. This doctrinal change is occurring at the
same time as the information technology explosion, and it is critical
to understand that military research and development is driving many
of these information technology innovations.
This new "Network Force" converts every person and vehicle in the battle theater into a detector and sensor source (Ref. 1) (Figure 4). Information is brought into central nodes in real time through portable fiber-optic networks and broadband satellite and cellular links. Wars are visualized from basement control centers. Network management becomes the critical command structure, "plug-and-play" teams deliver on-time resources, as required. That is the battlefield of the present. Can any of us ever forget the trail of dots on the computer screen of the NorthStar sensor network translating a short time later into the incredible destruction of an entire column of fleeing Iraqi vehicles north of Kuwati City in the Persian Gulf War?
A new functional job description has arisen from such Network Forces, so brace yourselves to start hearing of advertisements for employment of Knowledge Managers in the oil field control centers of the future. The critical job of who interprets the changes in oil, gas and water that are observed in a reservoir over time is a hybrid of engineer, geologist, geolophysicist and computer systems manager that is equivalent to the new Knowledge Managers in military command-and-control centers. In fact, they are the Chris Craft equivalent from NASA's mission control, the real-life character Ed Harris played in the movie Apollo 13. Their mission is to "observe, orient, decide and act" and they are called the OODA managers. The Network Force "unleashes an array of individual OODA loops, each free to respond to local and transient sets of diverse, complex battlefield environments" (ref. 1).
The introduction of this command-and-control structure to the management of oil and gas fields will be no small philosophical step. It is not matrix management with a new name. It is a true transfer of authority to the most "functionally specialized and integration-capable" people available (ref. 2). These are not engineers taught to communicate to geologists, or geophysicists taught to understand reservoir pressure behavior, but a new generation of network-capable geoscientists and engineers.
This infrastructure will create easy access to "Best Practice" services through both the Internet and company intranets. For American independents, technology that was only accessible to the large oil and gas companies in the past will be both reachable and affordable because it is coming from far-field suppliers. This has been a goal of the Gas and Oil National Information Infrastructure. (See the Internet web pages at http://cewww.eng.ornl.gov/gonii/ for example.)
The good news for American independents is that the larger the
current management bureaucracy, the harder the transition will
be to the diffuse, information-driven, networked organization
of the future. The company that manages oil fields in this networked
manner will realize a economic advantage as fundamental as the advantage the U.S.
military perceives it will realize with the Network Force on the battlefield.
They term this transition a "revolution in military affairs" (Ref.
3), and it is being instituted today, not tomorrow.
Figure 5. The networked oil field of the future.
To pull all this together (Figure 5), the business driver for this networked oil field of the future will be the 4D monitoring of oil and gas drainage with active permanently installed field sensors of all kinds transmitting real-time data to central processing and interpretation centers. Independents can purchase bandwidth, computing facilities, cycles, and even Knowledge Managers as easily as the largest oil companies because the components are readily available through these far-field sources. Just as tele-medicine places the latest advances in medical technology-- and the doctors who know how to use them-- at the disposal of general practitioners, so will the independent and small operator be able to access networked 4D monitoring services and technologies to instrument his oil and gas fields of the future. Then, each field will become a virtual enterprise of its own.
References:
1. Tempestilli, M., Naval Institute Proceedings, June, 1996, p. 42-46.
2. Lawrence, P.R. and Lorsch, J.W., Developing Organizations: Diagnosis and Action, Addison-Wesley, 1969, pp 11-27.
3. Fitzsimonds, J. and Van Tol, J., Revolution in Military Affairs, Joint Force Quarterly, Spring, 1994, pp. 24-31.