The intelligent oil field: meeting the challenges of today's oil and gas exploration and production industry

To succeed in the competitive upstream oil and gas marketplace, companies must leverage a diverse set of capabilities involving people, process and technology. In addition, competition for natural resources has driven companies to explore for and produce oil and gas in remote and hostile locations. And as the environment grows more diverse, the locations more unforgiving, and the business challenges more complex, skilled technical personnel are aging and becoming scarce.

To attract and retain available skilled professionals, companies need to change their corporate cultures. This requires implementing innovative business processes to help people take full advantage of near-real-time oilfield data and turn it into actionable information that can help to increase recovery and production, reduce operating costs and ultimately increase profitability. To accomplish this, companies must understand and embrace new ways of working. This involves establishing new roles and responsibilities—along with rewards and recognition programs—and new work processes to help create an environment that facilitates more informed decision making and efficient execution.

The ability to enhance decision making is crucial to overcoming many challenges. Increasing energy demand and geopolitical forces are creating a volatile commodity marketplace. Global competition for natural resources continues to drive the need to improve oil and gas reservoir performance. Shareholders and Wall Street analysts are pressuring companies for a return on their investments commensurate with other long-term investments. There is increasing public scrutiny concerning the environment and global warming, and recently the world has seen adverse publicity regarding alleged price gouging at the gas pump. And although new technologies have shown promise for meeting industry needs, it can be arduous to integrate new technology with existing processes, systems, organizations and global networks of diverse business collaborators.

The convergence of forces, threats and technologies creates a ripe environment for the intelligent oilfield—a solution that integrates people, process and technology to improve oilfield performance by leveraging frequently captured data that is delivered, converted to usable knowledge and acted upon in real time. Successfully implementing the intelligent oilfield to take full advantage of all available data requires a sophisticated program of projects designed to integrate key human and technology resources.

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