BP Poll Finds Data Challenge Waiting in the Digital Oilfield 

According to a poll taken today at the SPE Intelligent Energy International 2013 (IE2013) exhibition in Dubai, oil and gas professionals have unanimously identified the management and analysis of growing data volumes as the greatest challenge to the sector.

The event is expected to bring together 2,000 energy leaders from around the world, with areas of expertise ranging from business administration to engineering. BP conducted the poll during the event’s opening day and found that 100 percent of respondents think that analytics represents the industry’s next major challenge.

Not surprisingly the event was centered around the theme of leveraging real-time, integrated data, which BP then used as a springboard for debate on how the industry plans to move forward.

Already the company is using its Field of the Future program to review this progress, which is supported by 1242 miles of fiber-optic cables that link BP’s operations with 35 on-shore monitoring centers that create a global view of the company’s activities. The company has also opened the largest supercomputer for commercial research in its Houston datacenter this year.

Now more than ten years old, the program is used to coordinate data from production, operations and reservoir management to drive decisions. Since its inception, however, it has been expanded to include advanced remote surveillance, real-time data handling and analysis, remote well operations, as well as downhole and subsea sensors.

But this poll has made it clear that BP isn’t the only company looking to tackle this issue.

“A key benefit of the Field of the Future program has been the delivery of real-time information to assist in the making of better and faster decisions,” said Steve Roberts, vice president of the Field of the Future program at BP. “The delivery of ‘big data’ in a real-time environment is a logical extension and it is encouraging that our peers in the digital oilfield arena are also considering this question.”

In each the two full days of IE2013 that remains, BP plans to continue its research with additional delegate polls. Upcoming questions include whether delegates foresee robots being deployed at scale across the oil and gas production industry within the next 15 years, and if they expect that the digital generation will use emerging technologies to optimize production and safety management.