Tuesday, March 30, 2010

From the SPE Intelligent Energy Conference

Some highlights from Tuesday's technical sessions in Utrecht Netharlands last week:

- Shell and CapGemini talked about USD$5B in value from fields "born smart" or intelligent from the design phase, mostly from instrumented well bores, but also mentioned predictive maintenance as a goal
- Chevron gave a very generic presentation on transformational change around prioritizing their 200-some intelligent field projects
- Saudi Aramco defined their I-Field as mostly real-time drilling operations, with a goal to reduce the number of wireline operations (bet SLB and HAL loved to hear that!) to reduce costs
- BP had one of the more interesting and relevant talks, indicating their instrumentation now at over 2M tags on over 700 wells including 80% of their top 100 producers, and using real time monitoring to add 50K BOE / day in production. Preventative maintenance scheduling is in planning for their downhole flow meters in Azerbaijan. They are letting their producing asset customers drive the projects rather than pushing the technology, with goals of shifting support roles from offshore to onshore and reducing personnel on board
- Statoil's presentation on Integrated Operations specifically mentioned multi-field control centers for monitoring rotating equipment, but it was still in reactive mode
- PIPC closed out with a very high level presentation on best practices for automated oilfields

- Got a good look at PointCross's dashboard and workflow user interface, they are more concerned with the data management behind the scenes