In today’s world of petroleum exploration and production, optimizing discovery and recovery of resources requires collaboration between different workgroups, areas of expertise, and physical locations. Data (facts, modeling results, and conclusions) reached in one step of the petroleum process becomes input into the next step, growing along the way into the knowledge used for decision making.
Now, more than ever, it has become important to know and retain the facts and assumptions used to make the decisions. Now, it is important to know how and why decisions have been reached. Now, it is important that all data be shared and not reside in isolated clumps. Data needs to be available and used across any such silos in order to produce the optimum decisions.
One of Petrel’s strengths has been its integration across disciplines – its joining across fields in geosciences and engineering. But Petrel has been limited to one user of a project’s data at a time. Project sizes have been limited to the storage capacity of a single system. Petrel is not open and does not easily share its information with other applications.
Petrel DBX will help solve these issues.
Petrel DBX will store and transfer data from Petrel into a Seabed database. Seabed can contain large amounts of data. For example, CDA Limited, in the North Sea, stores more than 8 million curves of UKCS digital well log data in Seabed; the CDA datastore is one of the world’s largest collections of log data. Petrel DBX allows a Basin Exploration Team, a Field Development Team, and a Reservoir Enhancement Study to all use the same data; allowing results from one team to feed as input into the other teams. The processing history developed along the way can stay with the data, so there will be no problem discovering the source and quality of the information. Knowledge is shared, resulting in a process synergy difficult to achieve before now.
Maintainability, quality control, and ease of access to data are recognized as important differentiators in a company’s success. Petrel enables the transformation of data into intelligence. Petrel DBX provides the transformation from intelligence into the centralized corporate memory. No longer will data need to be scattered in difficult-to-manage files spread over the corporate information system; instead, the data can be centralized, stored, and made easily available to all.

Short Bio:

Todd is the Product Champion for Petrel Data in Context since July 2009 for Schlumberger Information Solutions. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Alberta in Canada and has been with SLB since 1991. Todd has held a number of roles within SIS including leading data management deployments in Germany, Norway, and Venezuela, then returning to Canada in 2000 where he held roles in product development and SIS service management. Most recently Todd was the technical data and integration project lead for a client?s worldwide Petrel deployment program.