Background

This case study involves a solution based on reusable modules for a fully integrated National Oil Company (NOC) ranked among the largest corporations on Fortune’s Global 500® list.  The reusable modules were the precursor to parts of a recently commercial software product called Geodatafy.

Challenges

Decision makers within upstream oil and gas companies lean heavily on timely, high quality basin analysis and lease evaluation.  This NOC found themselves struggling to provide quality information in a timely manner going into bid rounds. 

They were spending too much time assembling relevant information.  Like many exploration and production companies, their data was scattered across multiple systems and sources including OpenWorks®, Studio®, Petrel®, ProSource Seismic™, Recall™, CDS™, miscellaneous basin modeling packages, ArcGIS®, documents on shared file system, technical library catalog, data subscriptions from IHS and CGG.  Searching for information across all these systems was inefficient.

They were not leveraging prior work in the area due to challenges finding and accessing said previous work and when finally, an analysis was made, and assumptions altered, it was a time-consuming process to redo the decision analysis.

Solution

A three-component modular based solution was implemented to make information easily accessible and the visualization, integration, and analytics of those data practical and efficient.

Component One: The cornerstone of the solution are indexes.  Twenty-eight datastores were scanned into high-performance indexes to allow sub-second search and discovery across millions of disparate data sources.

Component Two:  A web-based geographic map and spreadsheet like interface allows end users to search for data items within the indexes as they might via google maps or amazon. Presenting a one-stop-shop for data, regardless of source, made searching for data more efficient immediately.  Ultimately, the search capability executed across more than six million documents, two million GIS items, and half a million subsurface data items.

Component Three: The ability to then integrate selected data with web-based viewers such as analytics from TIBCO Spotfire® launched straight from the web page made decision making easier and nimble.  Subsurface viewers allowed end users to preview seismic data sets and well information to make quick decisions regarding data quality and integrity, and thus reducing the redundancy and wasted work of moving/using unwanted data during analysis.

Altogether the three reusable modules, which have become part of the Geodatafy commercial product, streamlined workflows for this NOC’s basin analysis and lease evaluation teams by providing a single, performant, intuitive way of searching for data, visualizing those data, and sharing it with analytics at their fingertips.