By: Jagadish Maddiboyina, Senior Consultant - Oil & Gas

The price of crude oil (WTI) in the last decade was riding a roller coaster ranging maximum value of USD 157 (June2008), to minimum USD 29(Jan2016) per barrel. This week in 2018, it is approaching USD 63 per barrel. This variance in crude prices evolves with various business decisions in temporarily shutting the wells. When crude prices boost up, the businesses want to reopen the temporarily shut-In/Abandon wells, and in the same manner when crude prices decline, few deep drilling wells are temporarily shut-down by considering the economic viability of the wells. Henceforth, Geology & Geophysical data plays a vital role in classifying the wells, which can be re-opened or temporarily abandoned in the reservoir.

However, for most of this decade, the industry has not taken advantage of the opportunities that derive from using data and technology in a meaningful way. A single drilling rig at an oilfield, for example, can generate terabytes of data every day, but only a small fraction of it is used for decision-making. The reasons for accessibility of the data is:

• Most of the data is in physical format
• Lack of proper indexing of physical data
• Data resides in multiple & remote locations like oil rigs, fields and laboratories

Rapid advancement in technology, such as availability of Laser scanning of physical documents of all the document sizes produce the reliable and high-quality data. Once the documents are scanned, we identify huge varieties of documents in the O&G industry. Henceforth, these varieties of documents need a proper classification for good data governance. Classification of document is as follows:

• Low value digital data-Accounts data
• Long-lived digital data-Agreements, Lease & Operator documents
• High value digital data – G & G data

Low value and Long-lived digital data can be stored in a cloud-based documents system. High value digital data that includes seismic data, well logs, Maps, PVT data, etc can be stored in a cloud system, and these documents require basic processing for enabling the documents to be migrated to their respective applications like OpenWorks, Petrel, Arc-GIS & Production applications.

Digitizing Legacy Petrotechnical data program offers global availability of data improving the basin reassessment process. The program increases efficiency in data search-ability allowing the client to search documents in seconds from global corporate data repository

Few programs were successfully deployed for major Oil and Gas Company recently. Deep domain knowledge in technology acts as a key factor in the success of these program. The ability to empathize with customer business and innovation infused into the solution will result in reducing manual efforts. The future can have less heavy boxes to haul around and no more paper to store!