In today's U.S. shale fields, tiny sensors attached to production gear harvest data on everything from pumping pressure to the heat and rotational speed of drill bits boring into the rocky earth.
The sensors are leading Big Oil's mining of so-called Big Data, with some firms envisioning billions of dollars in savings over time by avoiding outages, managing supplies and identifying safety hazards.
The industry has long used sophisticated technologies to find oil and gas. But only recently have oil firms pooled data from across the company for wider operating efficiencies — one of many cost-cutting efforts spurred by the two-year downturn in crude oil prices.
ConocoPhillips says that sensors scattered across its well fields helped it halve the time it once took to drill new wells in the Eagle Ford shale basin of South Texas.
By comparing data from hundreds of sensors, its program automatically adjusts the weight placed on a drill bit and its speed, accelerating the extraction of oil, said Matt Fox, ConocoPhillips' executive vice president for strategy, exploration and technology.
It is just one application, but if applied to the more than 3,000 wells ConocoPhillips hopes to drill in the Texas basin, those small sensors could lead to "billions and billions of dollars" in savings, Fox said in an interview.
"We started using data analytics in our Eagle Ford business," he said. "And everywhere we look there are applications for this."
The cost and complexity of such systems vary widely. Oil giants such as ConocoPhillips buy a mix of off-the-shelf and custom programs, along with data repositories. Services firms including Schlumberger NV and General Electric's oil and gas unit sell sensor-equipped gear, data repositories and software to improve producers' decision-making.
A survey by Ernst & Young last year examined 75 large oil and gas companies and found that 68 percent of them had invested more than $100 million each in data analytics during the past two years. Nearly three-quarters of those firms planned to allocate between 6 and 10 percent of their capital budgets to digital technology, the survey found.
Simple sensors already increase safety and savings by eliminating the need to send workers to rigs or production facilities to gather data. Automating drilling decisions can produce more consistent results by cutting out human errors, said Duane Cuku, vice president of sales for rig technology at Precision Drilling Corp.
"The driller is now able to focus his attention on the well — and the performance and safety of his crews — as opposed to the manual manipulation of controls," Cuku said.
