Establishing State of the Art Unified Technical Data Center to Harness the Power of Legacy Data for Future Opportunities-An EP Success Story in Sharjah, UAE

摘要

Capitalizing on untapped potentials and quantifying risk is the key to success in a turbulent commodity industry. With an internal initiative to capture national knowledge and to safe guard sovereign data, Sharjah National Oil Corporation (SNOC) embarked on a multi-year journey to find, archive, digitize and integrate the entire E&P data in the Emirate dating from 1966 till date. The challenges and accomplishments of effective data management are demonstrated as a successful case study. Securing investment in a country’s petroleum industry demands for government agencies to add value to its oil & gas assets by making them readily available, globally. To do so, one of the most important steps was to effectively catalogue and manage technical information from both past as well as present exploration and production initiatives. Scattered archives for multi-disciplinary data including well reports, logs, maps, seismic sections, tapes, G&G studies, cores, cuttings and digital databases was centralized in one repository for the Emirate. A unified data quality assessment, metadata capture & naming convention was established for all data types including a technology infrastructure to enable maximum utilization and integration of data into future projects. Ambitious to exploit its current technical assets by evaluating historic data to attain maximum benefit to SNOC, partners and global investors; SNOC adopted a cohesive and effective physical & digital asset management approach with a phased methodology in early 2016. This data management activity was classified extremely critical to the E&P current and upcoming projects by laying the foundation for drilling SNOC’s 1st Exploration well, a successful Farm-out bid round, quantifying workover opportunities, regional interpretation and performing field development simulations. Centralizing and integrating the data management function enabled the operator to identify data gaps and work on fulfilling them to successfully establish a regional technical data center. The paper discusses the challenges of gathering, extracting and incorporating legacy data; shedding light on the value it generated in paving the way for a digital transformation in SNOC’s E&P business. Fluctuating technological, political and business influences add to the volatility and risk in the oil and gas business. The framework and success of future opportunities is reliant on the data used to quantify them. The method chosen for this journey was to modularize the data management project and structure best in class industry solutions for each aspect. The architecture for data management implemented is cost-effective; which is scalable and upgradable with minimum effort into a digital hub of information & knowledge management.