Introduction
This article reviews the contemporary trends in the energy industry and the role that Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU™) can play in your company if you are an energy operator or vendor dealing with energy applications. OSDU is one among the many forums of The Open Group, which is an industry consortium seeking to “enable the achievement of business objectives” by developing “open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications”. Open Group history goes back to 1996, when it was established by the merger of X/Open with the Open Software Foundation (OSF).
The OSDU™ is an Open-Source Data Platform that defines and use its own standard OSDU Open APIs for energy applications thereby erasing the silos that exist within different vendor energy applications; although you may continue to use the same vendor application, provided the vendor has adopted the open data model of OSDU. That also means your energy data is now cross platform and cross application accessible.
Visualize the possibilities it opens; as an example, let us picture the benefits of this within the petroleum industry. Imagine if you can extract well and seismic exploration data intelligence in a timely fashion, then it can make an enormous difference. Today this stopped first, by the data silos that exist in the energy applications space. Second, the current application centric legacy-approach we took, does not easily allow us to analyze one application’s captured data by another. Or at least it takes time to transform that data to make it fit for analysis by second application. Not resolving these real-world reservoir engineering problems injects time in the process, which in-turn makes the process costly and moreover, timely decisions cannot be made leading to missed opportunities.
This paper highlights how all this is about to change and what you need to do as an energy company’s executive or data scientist or geologist.
What?
In one statement OSDU creates a subsurface System of Record (SoR) by discovering, refining, and enriching the energy data. This is accomplished by separating data from applications, thereby making the energy-data, application-agnostic in the true sense. OSDU is a Solution for data access. Any application, home-grown or vendor off-the-shelf, once conforms to OSDU data platform standard, can have access to your energy data and perform the respective critical operations. Once OSDU framework is implemented and OSDU certified applications deployed, or current applications upgraded with OSDU certified applications; all applications will pass through a gate of OSDU Open APIs, which will be in front of OSDU energy data sets. When energy data becomes application agnostic, multiple possibilities open. For example,
Suddenly the language in which home-grown applications were written becomes immaterial. The only point in-house programmers need to remember is which API to call to get the data and how to put back value-added-data back into the OSDU data universe using the same APIs.
Use of SMART technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), Data Science (DS), utilization of Knowledge Based (KB) Systems, Big Data Analytics, and more. becomes a possibility with no need for extra time for pre-processing via an additional data sanitization process. Application of SMART technologies on energy data is currently an emerging trend.
Export and import of datasets across applications will give birth to new Value Adding Vertical Applications (VAVA) now becomes a possibility. In fact, this is already happening. For example, INT releasing IVAAP version supporting OSDU platform. IVAAP is a sophisticated large datasets visualization in 2D and 3D views, capable of fast rendering of large seismic datasets, geared towards the development of subsurface digital solutions.
Other such value-add (VAVA) solutions are currently available from your OSDU cloud instance and more will be added with the passage of time.
All this if properly put into a strategy could lead to efficiency gains, improved petrochemical asset management, increase drilling safety, induce money savings, optimization of the production pumps performance, production volume increases, reduce drilling time, improve shipping and transportation, and may force occupational safety progress. Every energy industry executive is looking to implement one or more of these ideas daily. Here we are talking about bulk implementation of those ideas just by a change in the energy data layer of your company.
HOW?
OSDU accomplishes its magic by shifting the paradigm from application centric energy environment to data centric. This will remove the data silos created by the different vendor applications and at the same time creates the much-needed opportunity for a quick application of SMART technologies usage to extract the underlying data intelligence and passing the data through multiple layers of VAVA[1] making the data more intelligent with every VAVA pass.
One of the objectives of OSDU is to create a subsurface data universe. This is accomplished by making OSDU a data centric service rather than application centric. Dealing with all kinds of energy data types from structured to unstructured, sensor generated to digital analyzed output data. OSDU facilitates the creation and maintenance of metadata of all master data, at source during the initial data uploads into the OSDU platform.
As a part of OSDU data definition architecture, when existing energy data is ingested into OSDU open-source data framework, it will for the first time create a data type for your application and alongside also creates metadata of your data that OSDU is ingesting. With this in place, the OSDU data with metadata can now be accessed by any OSDU certified energy application. Data interoperability is now a possibility. Also, should you decide to inject your energy data into SMART technologies — this could be done with ease, because of the existence of your data’s metadata and your data’s interoperability.
How about providing actionable solutions to the challenges upstream is facing today with its enormous quantities of well and seismic data? That solution now becomes robust, effective, efficient, and low-cost by utilizing the existing deployed vendor solutions across the energy data. For example, use of SMART Technologies on your energy data without any further massaging becomes possible. Or utilizing the concept of VAVA, as explained earlier becomes a reality. This is exactly how the OSDU data framework adds value in your “drill or no drill” decisions.
[1] VAVA stands for Value Adding Vertical Applications. This word is coined in this paper to highlight the phenomena of how data could be utilized by different applications and with each application pass, a little value could be added to the data, making the data more intelligent.
Why?
Recent technological improvements and common use of sensors in the energy industry resulted in massive energy related data production. For example, oil and gas exploration seismic data acquisition generates massive amounts of data that is used to develop 2/3D images of the subsurface layers. With the huge data comes huge opportunities, provided the opportunities are understood and the data is aligned, massaged, manipulated, and extrapolated for the hidden intelligence and interpretations. This becomes a possibility with the utilization of OSDU energy data framework. It is possible today to conduct raw data analysis in a timely fashion because of the availability of computational power along with the SMART emerging Technological innovations of DS, AI, ML, DL, KM, BDA and more.
OSDU is doing that no operator and/or energy vendor has accomplished in the past. OSDU key value add is in the process and enrichment of energy data making it interoperable with any OSDU enabled application. Geologists, energy engineers, geo- and environmental scientists spend a major part of their time searching datasets for meaningful patterns and interpretations. With a slight change in the underlying energy data layer and energy applications using OSDU data framework can have a drastic difference between your geologists/engineers/scientists investing their time in finding data patterns rather than utilizing their time, resources, and energy in maturing the next new opportunities and moving the pattern finding tasks to the SMART Technologies. This is precisely why OSDU data framework needs to be imbedded in your energy applications.
Summary and Conclusion
A well-orchestrated OSDU energy data set is poised to reveal key patterns solving complex engineering problems in the space of improving the oil and gas exploration and production efficiency, which in current conditions should be the top priority of energy industry.
OSDU supports real-time data access across platforms and applications. With well defined (RESTful) APIs for higher application layers to access lower layer of OSDU data. With this approach it is possible to create a data platform service that could be made accessible by any application that can interact with the OSDU defined APIs.
This makes OSDU a complete Energy Data Platform (EDP) that is ready to be utilized from different popular cloud-based hosting solutions, including an in-country hosting solution possible where and when required. Currently OSDU is provided from all major cloud vendors like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM. Just like you can request WordPress as your content hosting platform while engineering your cloud platform, you may request an OSDU energy data platform to be enabled within your cloud instance and the stated vendors will be able to deploy OSDU data environment within your cloud instance.
It is to be noted that all your underlying cloud infrastructure security and licensing controls as negotiated between you and your cloud provider remain in effect. Security protection layers are embedded within the OSDU Platform’s infrastructure layer, which is responsible for maintaining the critical security aspects for the OSDU data layer. These security sub-systems include AuthN, AuthZ based upon entitlement and role-based access, encryption both in transit and at-rest, audit log trail management and monitoring. For additional details contact your cloud provider.
Once this initial step of enabling your cloud instance with OSDU data platform is complete, you may now be able to import your legacy data into the OSDU enabled cloud instance and then start utilizing the SMART Technologies and the VAVA concept that OSDU enables.
Enablement of your energy application stack as OSDU certified, allows your environment to seamlessly capture and utilize the SMART technologies in the interpretation of seismic data, perform well correlation, build reservoir models, visualize reservoir simulation results, calculate volumes, produce maps, and design development strategies to maximize your reservoir data exploitation. Taking into consideration the risks and uncertainty associated with this kind of data, ML and DL models can predict from large and complex data sets, the underlying trends and forecast the potential issues in a timely fashion, from the raw data associated with a reservoir. This will provide your business with a new boost of energy and expand your opportunity horizon multifold.
With the release of OSDU Mercury Launch on Wednesday March 24, 2021, and commitments from key operators and energy software development vendors, this data framework is poised to provide substantial value propositions for all size operators in the form of collaboration among different teams, accelerated deployment of new capabilities and reduced well development time and cost. This in turn will improve efficiency and will reflect in the revenue growth.
This write-up is mostly written from hydrocarbons energy industry perspective. All the concepts, ideas, challenges, could easily be ported to non-hydrocarbons and upcoming energy diversification spaces like solar, wind farms, hydrogen, wave energy and more.
About the author
Asad Syed is a graduate of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics. His experience spans in Security Architecture, Security Operation Management, Digital Investigations & Forensics, Crisis & Threat Simulation, GRC Management, Threat Hunting, Cybersecurity Emerging Trends & Threat Mitigation, Database Security, Identity & Access Management, and Identity Federation. His interests are in the application of newer technologies, to enhance the output performance of technologies with which he is working. He is a writer, teacher, and cybersecurity evangelist, who has worked for multiple fortune five hundred companies and currently providing cybersecurity consulting to the upstream operations of the oil and gas industry. Reach him via GRC at ASyed dot net. ■
