digitalisation

There is a lot of buzz nowadays about “Digital Twins”, and every Digitalisation Director out there is thinking they need to have a Digital Twin of their assets. It makes sense: If you have a digital representation of your assets; you can simulate, test scenarios, plan operations and visualise data within the context afforded by the twin, without having to visit or “be present” in the real asset, especially if these assets are remote.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit us round about March 2020 and the Oil prices crashed, all of us working for the Oil & Gas industry panicked and prepared for the worse. In previous market downturns, budgets had been slashed and projects cancelled, but this time something quite different happened, at least in the Digitalisation space.

Production Well Testing is an essential part of managing an Oil & Gas field if the field has more than one well and production measurement resources are limited, as is generally the case.

I’m really excited about the long term partnership we have recently signed with Wintershall Dea for a number of reasons not least because it’s a great team and we have a lot of fun working together!

Back in July I asked myself the question “Why are we still in business after 11 years?”. A small specialist company in a big competitive industry. We’ve been through 3 downturns now and we continue to develop longstanding relationships with some of the most innovative operators in the business. Clearly we are doing something right but what is it?

Did you ever learn to play “Sweet child of mine” on the guitar? Like almost every other teenager who had a guitar I learned the opening riff to “Sweet child of mine” and I remember playing it in a guitar shop when I was testing out an amp, only to have one of the staff point to a sign on the wall that said anyone playing “sweet child of mine” would be thrown out the shop and told never to return!

A typical question for a Petroleum Field Manager is how well the asset is being exploited and if this exploitation is efficient and generates enough value for Operator and Partners. This article explores some answers based on our understanding of the challenges that appear throughout the life of the field, and to how to be prepared to transform them into opportunities.

Around 15 years ago Autonomy claimed this but it turned out to be a myth. In reality this is a really really hard problem for AI to solve. Here’s why, and then I’ll talk about some of the ways you can at least speed it up.

Getting new digital functionality working is complicated, especially when it involves integrating to existing systems from different vendors. The idea of copying all this data into a single ‘data lake’ is very attractive; everything will be in one place, your architecture drawings looks really clean, you don’t need to worry about how to connect to legacy systems or overloading them, the performance should be blisteringly fast. A modern one-stop-shop for all future development. I know this because this was my dream when we started Eigen 12 years ago! We were trying to build the one unifying data model that would enable all our functionality dreams. But here’s what we’ve found over the last 12 years.

We’ve all been there right, the project seemed simple to start with but once we got into it, it started getting complicated and all sorts of thorns started to crop up that took way more time to solve than anyone on the project governance board would believe.