Analytics Magazine Analytics Magazine, March/April 2014 | Page 38

OI L F IEL D AN A LY T I C S Regardless of different starting points and unique challenges, E&P companies share common goals – reducing the drag on business performance that stems from the lack of unified data and analytics capabilities. 38 | capabilities needed to make better deferment decisions. Or it might not have adequate insight into why production in a given well, field or region is declining, and how future production might be optimized using various intervention methods. In addition to different starting points, E&P companies have unique assets. As a result, the key problem for one company may lie in its seismic exploration methods, while for another the main challenge might be production management. Such differences dictate different strategies with regard to data integration and analytics, leading individual E&P companies toward different vendors and applications. Furthermore, E&P companies’ exploration, development and production operations historically have operated as separate departments. They support each other, of course, and information is routinely shared among departments. But integrated approaches have been difficult to impossible because the necessary information has typically been fragmented, housed in separate databases that are isolated from one another. This isolation takes two basic forms. Similar types of data may be isolated geographically. For example, production data may be stored in regional databases that cannot talk to each other. Production data also may be stored in different formats, and/or with different technologies, that prevent holistic analysis. Still, regardless of different starting points and unique challenges, E&P companies share common goals – reducing the drag on business performance that stems from the lack of unified A N A LY T I C S - M A G A Z I N E . O R G W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G