Analytics Magazine Analytics Magazine, March/April 2014 | Page 46

RES H AP E F RAC K I NG For the oil and gas industry, prescriptive analytics can help locate fields with the richest concentrations of oil and gas, make pipelines safer, and improve the fracking process for greater output and fewer threats to the environment. 46 | have already used prescriptive analytics to improve customer experience, reduce churn, increase up-selling and cross-selling revenue, streamline logistics and enhance other important applications. For the oil and gas industry, prescriptive analytics can help locate fields with the richest concentrations of oil and gas, make pipelines safer, and improve the fracking process for greater output and fewer threats to the environment. About 80 percent of the world’s data today is unstructured – videos, images, sounds and texts. Until recently, most big data analytics technologies looked only at numbers. The oil and gas industry looked at images and numbers, but in separate silos. However, the ability to analyze hybrid data – a combination unstructured and structured data – provides a much clearer and more complete picture of the current and future problems and opportunities, along with the best actions to achieve the desired outcomes. For example, to improve hydraulic fracturing performance, the following datasets must be analyzed together: • images from well logs, mud logs, seismic reports, • videos from down-hole cameras of fluid flow, • sounds from fracking recorded by fiber optic sensors, • texts from drillers’ and frack pumpers’ notes, and • numbers from production and artificial lift data. Taking hybrid data into account is critical 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