Oil and Gas Project Life Cycle: Why Software Agility Matters in Optimizing Field Analysis

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In any oil and gas project life cycle significant amounts of data are collected throughout all phases—exploration, drilling, early development, infilling, maturity, and decommissioning. These data are vital to understanding and interpreting field characteristics and supporting optimized planning and operations during every phase of the life cycle.
As data from development wells are collected, they further enhance the geologic and engineering interpretations of the field. An increasingly more detailed understanding of field characteristics and drilling completions allows engineers to determine the optimum number of wells required to efficiently drain the reservoir and opens in a new windowoptimize drilling strategies to minimize operational costs and maximize recovery.

Diversity of Data Throughout the Oil and Gas Project Life Cycle

Data used in the initial analysis of a petroleum play is a subset of the data used in analyses conducted when a proven oil field is being managed for production. Production data alone may include seismic studies, core data, lithologic information, well logs, completion data, pressure data, and early production rates. However, the opens in a new windowvolume and variety of data collected—and the software tools used by individual disciplines of the asset team—make a unified, multidisciplinary interpretation of all data a complex and difficult task. The true value of the individual datasets remains unrealized when datasets cannot be easily combined, analyzed, and visualized with other datasets to provide a comprehensive and accurate understanding of a reservoir.

The Need for Software Agility

To obtain the maximum value from the datasets generated throughout an oil and gas project life cycle, asset teams need software with the agility to:

  • Integrate, visualize, and analyze new data types and formats as they become available. Years ago satellite and LiDAR images were unavailable. Today, they provide benefits through several phases of the oil and gas project lifecycle. Increased instrumentation of field equipment and drill strings generates volumes of critical data that were previously unavailable.
  • Create customizable workflows that facilitate the complex collaboration of geoscience and engineering disciplines and interpretations related to reservoir management, seismic history matching, and modeling fluid contacts, salt domes, diapirs, and complex faulted structures.
  • Provide quantitative analysis of temporal (4D) seismic data and attributes by associating acquisition date stamps with seismic volumes to facilitate temporal animation of opens in a new windowchanging reservoir conditions.
Technologies supporting hydrocarbon asset development and recovery will continue to evolve, more rapidly than ever. This evolution is driven by the miniaturization of sensors incorporated into production assets, 5G that improves bandwidth and remote reach for data acquisition, and machine learning algorithms that extract ever-greater value from data generated throughout the oil and gas project lifecycle.
Agile software proactively anticipates and easily accommodates the evolution of technologies that generate new sources of data and facilitates the creation and customization of flexible workflows needed for efficient management of hydrocarbon assets. It enables all members of the asset team—geologists, geophysicists, drilling engineers, reservoir engineers, and compliance officers—to opens in a new windowcollaboratively visualize and analyze diverse datasets, both spatially and temporally, to optimize decisions throughout all phases of an oil and gas project lifecycle.

Agile software proactively anticipates and easily accommodates the evolution of technologies that generate new sources of data and facilitates the creation and customization of flexible workflows needed for efficient management of hydrocarbon assets.

Delivering Software Agility and Adaptability for Decades

opens in a new windowDynamic Graphics, Inc., founded by industry professionals in 1969, develops, delivers, supports, and continues to enhance opens in a new windowCoViz 4D, the leading visualization and analytic software for the oil and gas industry. With five decades of experience in working closely with oil and gas producers worldwide, we intimately understand the inherent value of the data generated throughout the life of hydrocarbon assets. CoViz 4D provides the agility and adaptability that enable asset teams to obtain the maximum value from their data.

By easily incorporating a wide range of industry-standard, as well as proprietary datasets, into a single visualization environment, CoViz 4D enables all disciplines within an asset team to collaboratively analyze and interpret reservoir data to optimize investment, planning, and operational decisions throughout the oil and gas project life cycle.

CoViz 4D, a data visualization analytics software from Dynamic Graphics, Inc., gives oil and gas professionals powerful visualization capabilities to explore data relationships and analyze how data changes throughout oil and gas project lifecycles. Enable your asset management teams to confidently make decisions on the field that positively impact profit and reduce operational risk. To learn more about CoViz 4D, contact our team.

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