Making the right decision

Tony Bowman explains how open software development platforms accelerate innovation - from the concept to end-user.

In the oil and gas industry today, oil and gas companies need the freedom to innovate, to solve real problems quickly, while at the same time investing for the long run. With the Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) open development platform, the E&P community can take innovation - quickly and easily - from concept to end users. Oil and gas companies now have the power to customise workflows - and globally distribute their intellectual property - to gain competitive advantage. Oil and gas companies continually strive to improve the quality of their decisions, evolving both technical and business processes. To that end, SIS has invested - and continues to invest - in a next generation integration platform from exploration to production. 

This model-centric approach supports high quality decisions, reducing uncertainty and risk and maintaining knowledge to add value throughout the lifecycle of an asset. The Ocean* development framework is an open and extensible development environment that is easy to use. It enables integration of applications and intellectual property within the Petrel interpretation and modelling workflow. New capabilities are immediately available and can be literally dragged and dropped into the Petrel baseline without waiting for the next release. Developers can focus on innovation, rather than infrastructure. The environment leverages modern .NET tools, and offers stable, user-friendly interfaces for efficient, productive development.

The Ocean framework manages much of the plumbing for E&P software with a feature-rich set of application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing software developers to focus on the domain logic of their applications. The Ocean ecosystem includes a growing community of E&P companies, independent software vendors, and universities. The Ocean environment significantly reduces the time from concept to end-user for next generation interpretation, analysis and modeling capabilities.

A growing number of oil and gas companies, independent software providers, and universities are innovating on the SIS open integration platform and working with us to implement forward looking workflows to tackle today's complex business challenges and evolve for the future. Shell has written over 100 Ocean plug-ins to make internal intellectual property widely available across its organisation. An example of one of the proprietary capabilities Shell has integrated into Petrel with Ocean framework is a 3D rock physics application. Once seismic data has been interpreted, a model is generated in Petrel. Next, the model is populated with rock physics properties. Then elastic rock properties are calculated, and synthetic seismic volume is generated. Finally, the synthetic volume is compared with the original seismic volume, and the difference is calculated. Iterations can be done to validate and continually improve the model and interpretation. Shell can deploy this on a standard baseline anywhere in the world and can make it a part of a standard workflow. Just as importantly, Shell keeps this capability proprietary. Only Shell has access to this application as a part of the company's Petrel workflow.

For more information: www.slb.com/ocean.

Tony Bowman is President of Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS), a position he assumed in April 2008. Most recently, Bowman served as VP of Products and Solutions for SIS.He joined Schlumberger in 1991 as a Geophysicist and held a number of leadership roles all over the world. He earned a Degree in Geophysics from Queensland of University.