Pre-cartographic people: Surface petroleum seeps signaled a site for the first oil wells, but as the industry grew, location devices were created to understand the unknown such as dowsing rods. Extrapolate. Innovate. Just keep going and understanding will follow. There was a freedom in smelling for oil. But it couldn’t last forever.
Cartographers of the subsurface: To understand the 3rd dimension lying below the landscape, engineers employ an array of mapping techniques sorting out the subsurface section by section. Shale has opened up a greater need for geomechanical inputs and an added complex understanding of the hydraulic fracture process. There be dragons in shale.
The oil and gas industry has lived at the frontier of mapping what can’t be seen. Data in many forms over many years has been the key to the spatial organizing of the earth’s layers. Data, all those collected points, describe a subsurface world that you have to be willing to bet on if you’re drilling for oil and gas. Particularly in shale. The right mix of data is crucial to answer specific questions, to enable the right computations and analytics for the information needed.
Data integration for creating a full picture of the shale subsurface is very important, but Petro.ai has moved away from that messaging in favor of more specific, tangible deliverables. "We do a lot of data integration for our clients,” Charles Connell, VP of Product explains, “It’s really with a focus on a business objective. What we’ve found is that getting data into one place just to have it all stored in one place is not very valuable.
“We’ve seen service companies that will put data in a cloud and make it accessible but that’s only part of the problem or part of the solution.
“What we do is very targeted data integration around specific subsurface operational data types to achieve some engineering goal.
“If we think about the Pad Scenario Analysis or the Completions Scenario Analysis those require a lot of different inputs both from the subsurface and engineering operational data that have to be integrated in a way to run analytics and that’s where Petro.ai is unique.
“We’re not really trying to be a data platform. We’re not trying to be the place where you land all your data. We’re trying to be the place where you bring together specific data types to solve some of the more pressing challenges in shale.”
“We bring together everything from the subsurface grids and surveys, microseismic data, different geologic variables, along with design parameters like lateral length, proppant intensity, completions variables as well as all the production data, both production volumes and pressures, to run these analytics. Through experience we’ve figured out what the most important data types are to answer these questions.
“The Petro.ai platform manages the data integration but we’re doing the computation or analytics on top of it. It’s one thing to enter a lot of data into a system like an historian to archive the data but if you’re just archiving the data, you can archive data in simple software. All the data types I just listed you can put into a Sharepoint folder and it’s in one place, but that doesn’t mean that you can run analytics on any of it.
“Having the right data together is critical so you can do the analysis you need. For instance, in determining the tradeoffs between proppant intensity and well performance, we use a lot of different data types to come up with that analysis.So, putting it all into a sequel data base or putting it all into Sharepoint wouldn’t allow you to run that analysis. That’s why Petro.ai is different in that we’re not just pushing the data integration story. It’s a workflow solution/answer product that requires a lot of data integration on the front end.”
Pulling the right data together for the right computations deepens your accurate understanding of the subsurface, of your shale reservoir. Petro.ai provides that certainty by using relevant data to answer relevant needs. You don’t need to improvise. You’re mapping the shale subsurface with pertinent information so that the dragons stay on the edges where they belong.
