Page 39 - Intelligent Digital Oil And Gas Fields

20 Intelligent Digital Oil and Gas Fields

1.6 THE VALUE OF A DOF IMPLEMENTATION
1.6.1 Industry Challenges

Upstream oil and gas is characterized by intense competition for acreage,
capital, and markets; so all hydrocarbon producers must focus on production
efficiency. Oil prices are volatile and the costs for extraction typically
increase in more challenging environments, such as deep water and arctic
locations and unconventional resources (e.g., shale oil and gas). Mature fields
also require intense focus on operating efficiency.
Environmental concerns are paramount in many locations such as the
arctic regions, deep water, and urbanized areas. Thus, there is potential
for remote operations with less labor. Even with volatile oil prices, the
world demand is poised to increase at a rate of 0.25% a year, which
requires an increase equivalent supply of 200M STB/d of crude per year.
This increased demand requires new development and production
activity.
In the quest for a better balance between complying with environment
policies and meeting the world oil demand, the oil and gas industry faces
strategic challenges in these areas:
• complex operations: complexity within a single asset offshore, multi-
plewells,multiplepossiblepointsoffailure,welloperations,well
interventions, completions, and logging occurring miles below the
ground;
• potential for significant Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) impacts:
inherently dangerous operations (complex machinery in remote envi-
ronments), high risk to people; if an event occurs negative impact to
the environment);
• global energy demand versus cost to produce;
• reducing human intervention at operation;
• transforming, sometimes high risk, oil operations into modern
technology-driven ones;
• renovating the sluggish and reactive oil operations into faster response to
the undesired events, with better prediction of malfunctioning by using
an automated process;
• improving cross-discipline communication and collaboration; and
• management by exception to reduce intervention costs, labor, and
EH&S impacts.