Page 388 - Intelligent Digital Oil And Gas Fields

The Future Digital Oil Field 327

hydrocarbon exists) and (b) manipulating matter at that scale will enable us to
access surfaces by nanomaterials that would not be possible otherwise. In the
future, the idea is to develop fully functional and steerable nanomaterials
(called nanoagents) that are capable of traversing the rock formation by
harvesting their own energy (maybe from the fluid flow or heat of the res-
ervoir), reporting about the reservoir properties, and supporting discovery
procedures and oil recovery processes. These nanoagents could store the
information in a variety of ways including a detectable change in their opti-
cal properties, chemical signatures, etc. Once recovered at the surface,
nanoagents can be interpreted by engineers and scientists. For some
nanoagent templates, progress has been made beyond lab testing. For exam-
ple, model templates of nanobased tracers (e.g., A-Dots and advanced
tracers) have been deployed in the field in cross-producing wells, an
industry-first cross-well field tests.
Autonomous, self-controlling, human-free transportation is becoming
the future of civil and cargo transportation. Will the O&G industry see a
similar trend toward the autonomous control and automation of technology
platforms for future DOF systems? The question was posed to Vasily
Demyanov, associate professor at Heriot-Watt University’s Institute of
Petroleum, who responds that the technology for remote and autonomous
sensing has improved considerably in recent years from the breakthrough in
scale miniaturization of the monitoring instrumentation. Micro- and nano-
scale sensors are now being developed with a current level of technology that
reveals new distinct properties of materials, including 2D films. Implemen-
tation of such monitoring technology would enrich and make a step change
for DOF monitoring. The target here is to collect cheap and abundant infor-
mation about what is going on in the reservoir and how it responds to
interventions.

9.2 DATA EVERYWHERE

Raed Abdalla, CEO of Evinsys, a DOF solution provider, says that the
next generation is really going to be in three areas: (1) Data: data will be pro-
vided faster, and more real time, but there will be growing need for security
because of so many connected devices. We have a real gap right now for data
and networks. (2) Data use: there is a drive for analytics and predictive ana-
lytics and to store and track the data and predictions. (3) Management of
connected devices: there is no holistic system to manage many inter-
connected devices, that is, monitor and report on the health of devices,