Digital Oilfields – Exploring New Possibilities for a Better Future for the Oil & Gas Industry

Undergoing a massive transformation, the Oil & Gas industry has welcomed the digitalization wave unswervingly. As is the case with almost every other industry that is going through the imminent digital transformation, there is no denying that this industry is also driven by a very powerful combination of embryonic technologies such as cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Augmented Reality.

The oil companies of the day operate in a pretty volatile setup. With industry entering its third year of recovery, the growth is increasing at a remarkable rate pushing revenue generation up. Now, the ideal solution that combines sensor technologies as well as adopts cloud-oriented big data analytics is no doubt the upheaval of digital oilfields.

An environment that offers real-time data collection on oil fields to be monitored remotely is known as a Digital oilfield. This system helps in optimizing oil production and happens to be one of the rapidly growing areas of research.

Disruption of the Conventional Models

There is no denying that the digital revolution is already affecting many industries and will keep doing so in the forthcoming decades. Be it producers, employees and suppliers, each of these stakeholders are facing the prominent impact of the economic condition in the Oil & Gas sector. Permitting companies to exploit their limited resources, digital oilfields offer highly technology-oriented solutions. Digital oil fields assist employees in a more accurate and quick manner to analyze the ever increasing data volumes that are produced owing to the highly advanced engineering technologies, like down-hole separation, MWD (Measurement-While-Drilling) applications, down-hole multiphase sensors and multilateral completions

Digital Oilfields Hold the Key to the Future

Talking about the demanding Oil & Gas industry, where innovation to enhance performance and increasing bottom line is not just an option, digital oilfields definitely hold the key to success. Looking at the present scenario and the dependence on fuel, there are high chances that the oil consumption is going to increase twofold within the coming two years. As a result there is likely to be a pressure on labor and expenses for the Oil & Gas industry. Justifying capital expenses based on the mounting revenues which the oil drilling firms can make is still possible however it isn’t the same with human labor.  

Digital oilfields can prove to be a boon for the oil sector by helping extract high volumes of hydrocarbons with very less resources. Lot of minute data points are fed to computers that are situated at supervising stations by the sensors equipped on the wellheads, pipelines and different equipment fitted along the upstream. These systems help in analyzing and interpreting valuable details about the condition and output of the oil fields.

Benefits of the Digital Oilfields Invite Major Industry Players

Keeping in view the many benefits of digital oilfields, off late, there has been many new entries to the foray by top engineering companies: 

• Highly efficient process of operation to enhances the productivity of workforce to a major extent.
• Easy to integrate with automatic pump controls that help in controlling oil extraction volume as real-time or near-real-time data is fed to the systems.
• This data can be further used to track the efficiency of equipment and the surface conditions to reduce rig downtime.
• With the integration of the field information with details from the seismic analysis of third party, the digital oilfield help in charting out the future production estimation.
• Almost 25% of net value is likely to increase through the Digital oilfields.

It is owing to these benefits as well as the vast opportunities offered by the digital oilfields, quite a lot of leading engineering companies have moved into the field in the last few years.

QuEST Global, is a leading provider of the latest engineering solutions to various industries, is already working in association with several firms in the oil and gas sector to implement digital oilfields. Organizations can considerably improve productivity of their digital oilfields by activating controlled data management across the enterprise.

Meeting the Future with Digital Oilfields

It is evident that investment in digital technologies can help the Oil & Gas firms to cut down costs and make faster & better decisions.  Regulatory reporting needs, high quality proficiencies for allocation and volumetric accounting are needed for expansion of upstream portfolios. Transformation to digital oilfields offers several tactical & strategic solutions to the Oil & Gas the industry. This also invites alliance of excellence centers that links the best minds to the paramount issues for workflow-oriented collaboration, virtualization, visualization and optimization to support quick decisions and insights.

Trending engineering solutions are already in use by many Oil & Gas companies to improve their oil production and this is likely to gain further momentum in the future. There would come a day when “Digital is new Oil” will buzz the industry in a much louder manner.

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