Petrolink, Halliburton, Geologix, Kongsberg, IDS and Schlumberger managed to integrate all of their systems together using WITSML, at the Energistics exhibition stand at IADC
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How you can connect a rig, onshore data store, office store, visualisation systems, reporting systems and geological tool kits together, with systems from different companies, using WITSML. It was demonstrated on the Energistics exhibition stand at IADC in March
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In the future, many different companies will be able to get involved in handling drilling data, including gathering it from rigs, sending it to shore, doing different processing tasks on it, packaging it, transmitting it and displaying it in the most useful possible manner, with every company involved providing different expertise, and customers free to switch between different data service providers at any time.
This is the vision for Energistics’ WITSML, a standard for exchange of well site data.
A demonstration was put together of how future data systems could be structured at Energistics’ exhibition stand at the recent IADC (International Association of Drilling Contractors) annual meeting in Amsterdam on March 1-3.
The demonstration involved Petrolink, Halliburton, Geologix, Kongsberg, IDS and Schlumberger.
WITSML data was sourced from three independent WITSML servers, one supplied by Kongsberg and the other two by Petrolink; from there, it was sent to client solutions supplied by Kongsberg, Geologix, Halliburton, IDS and Schlumberger for further processing and visualisation.
WITSML has been around for several years but there have been interoperability problems caused by small differences in the way the standard was implemented in different companies (called ‘dialects’) which made it hard for the systems to be all plugged together. This has been addressed and the next WITSML release, 1.4.1, which will be published later in 2011, has had a number of revisions to promote interoperability.
The IADC demonstration was based on WITSML version 1.3.1 and even with that release the systems really can be plugged together and work straight away. “We all came here on our own time, sat down yesterday and got this working in a few minutes,” said Jim Brannigan, real time data champion of Schlumberger.
Companies in the demonstration
In the demonstration, Petrolink provided a data acquisition box, or “PetroDaq” rig server which would be used onboard the offshore platform, collecting data from all of the rig sensors. The server sends the WITSML data to a “Petrovault” WITSML server onshore. For WITSML communications from the rig to the shore, a 500 kbps continuous data communication is adequate.
The Petrovault server can then store the data and serve it to wherever it is needed, for further processing or for visualisation (enabling people to work with it).
UK company Geologix is collecting operations data from a WITSML server, and processing real-time geological information in it (to provide information about lithologies) and sending it back to the server.
Oil and gas software company IDS (a company based in Aberdeen, Malaysia, Canada and Indonesia), has developed tools which interrogate the WITSML real time data stores, and gather the data, to make its DataNet2 reports. 85 per cent of the data the company needs for its geological reports can be gathered from the system, the company says.
Halliburton Drilling Services can provide data from its drilling operations in WITSML. The data can be aggregated and re-sent to wherever it is needed. Halliburton also acts on the receiving end of WITSML data, to populate its Engineers’ Data Model (EDM) platform.
Kongsberg Oil and Gas Technologies (KOGT) has services to distribute WITSML data to clients onshore, where it is used in its Kongsberg Intellifield operations rooms.
Schlumberger also works with the WITSML data. “The more we can get this into our clients’ workflows, the more the value of the information,” said Jim Brenningan, real time data champion of Schlumberger.
Petrolink has developed a number of visualisation systems, including one which enables WITSML data to be viewed on an iPad, in a special HTML5 format which is designed for tablets.
There are currently 110 companies in Energistics, although you do not have to be a member of Energistics to use the standard. “These companies are all competitors, but you see how quickly they can work together,” says Randy Clark, CEO.
Read more at digital energy journal