Key Digital Oil Field Technologies: An Introduction
Marlee Rose ??????
Perpetual Student of the Oilfield. Author of "The Savvy Oil & Gas Operator". Lover of all things Oil & Gas.
The digital oil and gas field (DOF) didn't spring up overnight. According to “Intelligent Digital Oil and Gas Fields: Concepts, Collaboration, and Right Time Decisions,” the technologies that enabled the creation of digital oil fields developed beginning in the 1960s with the first digital oil fields appearing in the 1980s through the implementation of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. As with almost all technological innovations, one development led to another, to move from the SCADA systems oil and gas used in the 1980s to the oil and gas monitoring systems of today. This began with a little military innovation called ARPANET.
The Internet
The foundation of digital oil field began in the 1960s when the military, academic institutions and the private sector formed ARPANET to share data for project development and research. As author Walter Isaacson writes in his 2014 book, "The Innovators," each innovation led to another. For example, two innovations from the military's research network led to what became the World Wide Web - the Internet and hypertext. The former provided the communication's conduit while the latter provided the language.
ARPANET's development led to connecting multiple computers via "packet switching and distributed network hubs." By the mid-1970s, it spawned the standard protocol IP/TCP and welcomed commercial enterprises unrelated to military or government research. A decade later, what people now call the Internet began, allowing any person with a connection.
Digital oil field takeaway: The standard IP let the oil and gas industry connect sensors within its value chain that communicate with centralized and distributed networks.
Mobile Data
By the turn of the century, another communications technology - mobile communications - had taken off. Its growth went from the car phones popularized in 1980s to cellular phones popularized in the 1990s. The birth of the smartphone in 2007 increased the amount and type of data transmitted.
According to the research of Gustavo Carvajal, Stan Cullick and Marko Maucec, by the beginning of the current millennium, more than 33 percent of the world population used cell phones. These users transmitted 180 exabytes of audio, photos, text and low resolution video - and that occurred before high speed Internet and smartphones.
Digital oil field takeaway: Mobile technology enables digital oil field sensors to send big data to networks and data/alerts to hand-held devices used by personnel in the field.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
To learn more about The Internet, Mobile Data, Big Data, The Internet of Things, The Digitized World, and Digitized Exploration, check out our full write-up on the subject here:
https://elasticops.co/blog/an-introduction-to-the-technologies-of-the-digital-oil-field/
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