According to the January 15, 2009 Monthly Statistical Report published by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the total demand in the U.S. for combined petroleum products hit its lowest levels since 2003. The findings are a result of high market prices early in the year and an increasingly weak economy as the year progressed. The same report indicated that crude oil and petroleum product imports hit a five-year low at 12.9 million barrels per day. This data underscores the challenges faced by energy companies as they balance volatile market conditions with shareholder value creation.

Maintaining this balance often requires optimizing operations or “doing more with less.” Founding this principle is the capability to provide greater amounts of actionable information, which allows the capabilities and roles of participants to evolve in order to deliver maximum value. For example, access to real-time information allows product marketing to develop more structured agreements, creating the opportunity to leverage a volatile market condition.

Collecting, distributing and managing real-time information within the organization has become the role of next-generation SCADA solutions that completely integrate field data with other enterprise information systems. This complete integration creates an “enterprise operations platform” and provides oil and gas companies with far more valuable information, which facilitates more effective decisions.

SCADA origins

Originally, SCADA systems were in place solely to collect small amounts of data from remote field devices. Remote terminal units (RTUs) reduced the need for manual attention to wells by centralizing data in an operations control room. While an important first step in improving data collection and use in the organization, this field data remained locked in a separate silo.

Starting in approximately the year 2000, improvements in field devices and network infrastructure led to improved SCADA systems that collected measurement and billing data daily or even hourly, resulting in the accumulation of massive amounts of data. At the same time, the evolution of corporate network infrastructure enabled copies of this data to be made available to business users in replicated data stores. Though a significant advance over the early SCADA systems, business users who received access to this data identified still more potential for integrating the data with their increasingly sophisticated enterprise systems. They saw that by incorporating field data into business analysis and reporting, the information would be consumed by more users, who could then more effectively contribute to business decisions.

Real-time information

Today, economic forces, including extreme market volatility; demand that SCADA systems deliver on the full potential of distributing field data throughout the enterprise, from top-level executives to billing, customer care, marketing, production and field engineers, and volume management. Marketing teams need to capitalize on every opportunity. Operations requires real-time information for planning, delivery and shipment. Regulations continue to increase the requirement and frequency of data reporting. It’s not uncommon for major gas production companies to process three to five hundred million field data updates per day. As enhanced recovery techniques are embraced, there is every indication that the quantity and frequency for collected data will continue to increase as other analytical events are introduced for feedback and optimization of those processes.

In addition to operations, business users are challenged to make the best possible decisions in a more volatile market, and therefore require answers to very specific questions such as:

  • How much excess capacity is available for sale right now?
  • On a per-well basis, where is the production vs. design or planned production?
  • What geographical issues, such as right-of-way access, and environmental issues are relevant to the current troubleshooting event?
  • Has all the data been collected to facilitate the monthly close process?

Answering these questions requires a single data collection and distribution platform that is capable of managing massive amounts of field data and translating it into actionable information that a variety of business users can understand. An enterprise operations platform environment is the foundation on which these requirements will be met.

Usable information

With massive amounts of data collected from tens of thousands of geographically distributed field devices for use by both operations and non-operational users such as marketing, scheduling, and finance, the data needs to be represented in a natural or normalized manner.

A system alert that says “register # 661, device FR_111 has a value of 152.03” may be meaningful to an operations user, but it likely means nothing to a marketing representative who needs useful information about what quantity of gas is moving through a meter or station.

Based on a unified data model (UDM), an enterprise operations platform uses common definitions to transform data from any source system into useful business information within the target system. With a UDM, marketing representatives see the information in a context relevant to their function.

Any device, any time

Large enterprises today are a collection of historical choices and evolving standards. As a result, there is often a diverse collection of operational devices and corporate systems. The information from these is transferred across a wide range of communication mediums using a multitude of methods and protocols: LANs, WANs, VPNs, the Internet, satellite, cable, leased lines, cell phones, XML, WebServices, .NET, ODBC, etc. Couple this with the reality that users access information through a vast array of devices and platforms – desktop computers, notebooks, tablet PCs, smart phones, web browsers, instant messaging, wikis, etc. – and the challenge is obvious. The enterprise operations platform, designed for maximum flexibility, must support all the major enterprise standards and be able to adapt as enterprise characteristics evolve.

A single solution

An enterprise operations platform must create a single, complete ecosystem – backed by a single vendor and development approach – that is easy to deploy, maintain and upgrade. It must include all the SCADA features that operations are accustomed to using to fulfill baseline requirements: historian, alarms, notifications, calculation engines, etc.

It must incorporate the new capabilities that business users are clamoring for, such as enhanced gas measurement data collection for more reliable monthly close and volume distribution, and the ability to integrate geographic information system (GIS) asset management capabilities with operating conditions and core business management applications to eliminate the disconnect between these data silos and present a more complete picture of current business reality. It should also offer APIs so businesses can access the data from their custom applications.

The solution must be architected to provide both the operations and business user community with confidence that they will be able to collect, manage and distribute ever greater volumes of data as the demand grows. Once users have access to the data, the system will be judged on its ability to provide a consistent quality of service.

Enterprise operations platform

One of the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies has seen the complete SCADA evolution and several years ago it recognized the need to dramatically improve how data was collected and managed and how that data would be consumed by business users. By deploying an enterprise operations platform, the company has dramatically streamlined its operations, made valuable information available to users across the company, and positioned itself for long-term growth.

In the early 1990s, the company replaced its manual processes with a first-generation SCADA system, installing RTUs on well sites to collect pressure, volume, temperature and other data from electronic sensors and centralized this information on operations desktops. But the system was painfully slow and there were limited methods with which to share the information required for daily tasks, such as tracking pipeline production and analyzing real-time information to meet regulatory reporting requirements, remained a huge and time-intensive challenge.

In the mid-2000s, however, as the company deployed new RTUs and enhanced its communications infrastructure, it also developed a five-year plan to overhaul its SCADA system to obtain the full benefits of an enterprise operations platform. The goal was to replace 14 separate silos of data with one system that would collect data updates daily from every corner of the enterprise and transform this data into formats that everyone from marketing executives to production managers to depletion engineers could understand and use.

The company partnered with CygNet Software to break down the silos of data and, equally important, turn the data from 15,000 wells and 14,000 meters into meaningful information for those outside of the operations group.

At an operational level, the system also allows reservoir engineers to track in real-time the production of remote producing wells when they change from flowing mode to shut-in. It allows experts in plunger lift systems sitting at a desk in one state to help engineers in another state tune a well in real time, saving the company time and money. It also allows production accounting managers to access the data required to create monthly audits.

To date, more than 500 employees in nine groups have been trained to use the new system. Field operations and gas marketing departments currently rely on the system most often, followed by the production accounting department.

The company credits the new enterprise operations platform with both improving productivity and saving workers’ time. For example, one support specialist who used to track six separate automation systems daily now pulls data from one source, taking just 5% instead of 40% of his workday. This allows the support specialist to handle a larger territory, as well as additional work projects that were formally outsourced to integrators. The system has also reduced field support hours company-wide by 30 to 50%.