The spectacular emergence of an industry that drills in shale
formations to produce hydrocarbons is generating massive quantities of
untapped data. The $600 billion
in U.S. shale infrastructure investments and the nearly 2,000 million
well-feet drilled has produced hundreds of petabytes of relevant data.
This vast, diverse shale-data domain—comparable in scale to the global
digital health care data domain—remains largely unexplored and is ripe
to be mined by emerging big-data analytics.
In every sector of the economy, the availability and collection of
data from machines, services, and business operations are growing at an
astonishing faster rate. The use of big-data analytics offers nearly
every industry the potential for unprecedented insight, efficiency, and
economic value. America’s shale industry is similar to many other large,
complex businesses—such as aviation, agriculture, manufacturing,
entertainment, and health care—in the scale and diversity of its
operations. What distinguishes shale is its unique combination of youth,
the diversity and scale of data associated with its operations, and the
variety of environments in which operations occur.
Cumulative Distance Drilled in Horizontal Shale Wells
Data are associated with and often collected for every foot of well
drilled and operated, including: for the seismic subsurface maps; for
the sensors used to analyze the earth during drilling; for the trains
and trucks carrying sand and equipment to the site; for the pumps and
flow meters pushing sand and water underground; for all the hardware and
software moving the product to market; and for the array of safety and
environmental compliance-related equipment.
The quantity of shale-related data generated can reach 1 megabyte per
foot drilled; the total quantity of data generated per well can vary
from 1 to 15 terabytes. With the proliferation of ever-better sensors
and the continued decline in the cost of accessing, transmitting and
storing bytes, the data flows will expand.
In total, across all the different and disconnected operational
silos, there are likely (no one yet tracks it) on the order of 600
petabytes of data associated with finding, stimulating, and extracting
and moving shale hydrocarbons. (For comparison, there are about 500
petabytes of global digital health care data.
Thus the single biggest disruption now coming to the shale
industry—one that will define the emergence of Shale 2.0—comes not from
individual technologies or digital connectivity (the “connected oil
field”), but from the use of big data for radically better asset
optimization and operations.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markpmills/2015/05/29/oil-glut-part-3-big-data-will-propel-the-next-u-s-shale-oil-boom/?ss=energy