How cloud services is helping E&P companies focus on the business of oil and gas rather than IT demands.
Robert Innes, Commercial Director – Well Planning & Drilling Engineering, Paradigm
What does Amazon have in common with well planning, drilling engineering and geosteering? On the surface – not much. Yet as drillers, we can appreciate a deeper look.
Beyond the website that allows you to purchase bestseller books lies a back-end global infrastructure spanning millions of computer servers, data storage systems and complex software. The scale of this infrastructure is immense – estimated to be five times larger than 14 other cloud computing providers combined, as The New York Times recently reported.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)™, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com. The service helps enterprise customers reduce overall IT costs, stay focused on applications for vital projects and meet demands on scalability.
Cloud computing holds increasing appeal for oil and gas operators, who are pressured to act fast on oilfield plays. According to IDC Energy Insights’ Predictions 2014: Worldwide Oil & Gas, cloud will see an uptick in industry adoption this year, mainly for its quick deployment and flexibility.
Cloud also takes the storage load off the shoulders of the operators, who must manage vast amounts of data – from seismic acquisition, SCADA systems, well logs, surface and subsurface sensors, production meters, contracts, etc. – to derive value. Building on-premises IT infrastructure to store and manage all this data can be slow and expensive. Cloud services removes time spent on installing and configuring hardware. Instead, an enterprise pays for the resources it consumes on a variable basis. A user can also access the software, applications and documents they need from anywhere – appealing to an industry with a globally dispersed workforce.
Drilling from the Cloud
We recently announced that AWS will begin providing infrastructure services that allow customers to easily run the Paradigm Sysdrill® integrated suite of well planning and drilling software solutions. By deploying Sysdrill in the AWS cloud, E&P companies can ensure rapid provisioning, simplified management and lower costs. This is in addition to enhanced well planning accuracy and reduced drilling risk and uncertainty through the software’s advanced capabilities. Paradigm will provide multiple levels of support for the AWS cloud, allowing customers to pick the level of management control they require.
A fully engineered onshore field development displayed in the Sysdrill 3D Viewer
IADC/SPE 2014
Paradigm is showcasing Sysdrill on Amazon Web Services at booth #817 during the IADC/SPE Drilling Conference & Exhibition, March 4 – 6 in Fort Worth, Texas. Sysdrill demonstrations will highlight how the advanced software solutions provide detailed engineering design and accurate well placement at every stage of the process, helping geologists and geoscientists:
• Enhance well planning accuracy,
• Reduce drilling uncertainty,
• Quantify wellbore position and precision, and
• Improve drilling safety.
Event attendees can also book a private demo of the Sysdrill, Geolog and OpsLink products, which offer a real-time, vendor-neutral geosteering solution to support these drilling objectives. Visit our IADC/SPE 2014 event page for more information.
Cloud and Oil & Gas: A Perfect Fit
Amazon Web Services has built a cloud infrastructure designed to support the most demanding workloads from some of the world’s largest enterprises. Upstream workloads are about finding and extracting hydrocarbons from the subsurface, which require huge amounts of information to be analyzed and acted upon. At Paradigm, we see real value for oil and gas in the scalability, flexibility and ease-of-use of cloud services to run these workloads with minimal IT management and additional investment. And this closely aligns with our mission of providing advanced science software solutions to all E&P users – without boundaries or limitations.