Page 23 - Intelligent Digital Oil And Gas Fields

6 Intelligent Digital Oil and Gas Fields

At the start of the new millennium, more than one-third of the total
global population used mobile phones transmitting an astronomical record
of 180 exabytes in data such as text, pictures/videos (low resolution), and
audio. In 2007, smartphones (iOS and Android) were launched, officially
ending the analog era, and open many windows into cyberspace and
hand-held portable devices (not a desktop computer).
In the last 10years, the era of cloud computing—where data are stored in a
repository data center to maintain structure, organize, and process and are
accessed through public or private networks—has become endemic. Today,
the common expression for the immense data size with exponential expan-
sion is big data, a reference to the fact that massive volumes of digital data
are not only stored but beyond that the data represent interconnected
sources and the data are actually analyzed (by machine learning, neural net-
works, and process statistics) in real time to enable a multitude of business
decisions and transactions. These systems rely on sharing of resources to
achieve data coherence and economy of scale.
With a global network and massive amounts of data available, both
consumers and businesses want access to all of that with more than just a
hand-held device. The Internet of Things (IoT) (Fig. 1.4) is the term used
to describe connecting a series of devices integrated with electronic,
software, and sensors to the Internet to allow sensing and controlling
remotely any object such as home alarm, doors, heating and cooling system,
cars, etc. In 2015, Cisco announced that more than 99% of total objects in
the physical world are still not connected to the Internet (Evans, 2012). They
predict that by 2020, 37 billion “smart things” will be connected to the
Internet. A Wall Street Journal article (Kessler, 2015) described how
ever-smaller technology will have revolutionary new applications such as
releasing sensors into blood streams to detect disease, sensors on glasses
projecting directly to the eye’s retina, 3D printing of equipment, construc-
tion sites customized in real time, and having thousands of sensors in oil wells
miles below the ground.
Sensors in oil and gas wells, pipelines, processing equipment, and com-
pressors are becoming much less expensive for the hardware, data transmis-
sion, communication, and their deployment compared with systems just a
few years ago. Data acquisition that used to require expensive instruments,
terminals and panels, communication lines, and slow transmission can now
be done for a fraction of price, equipment footprint, and data limits. Thus
technology advancements were key to enabling the DOF a reality, as you
will see in the following chapters.