Pushed to the limit in drive for oil and gas

Information overload, long the scourge of the digital age, is now threatening world oil supply. That is because the search for oil and gas is becoming ever more data-driven, as oil companies push their Earth scientists and petroleum engineers to the limits of their expertise. Be it from deep ocean waters, the high Arctic or from thousands of metres beneath the world's most inhospitable deserts, that search is unearthing reams of data that must be processed, analysed and interpreted in increasingly sophisticated ways. But in the jargon of information technology, much of that raw material is now languishing for long periods in "data silos", sometimes never to emerge.

According to the software developer Landmark Software and Services, a unit of the oilfield services company Halliburton, that represents industrial-scale inefficiency. Just as the millions of barrels of crude that spilt from the BP oil well into the Gulf of Mexico this summer represented a shocking waste of resources, so does the collective failure of oil companies to come to grips with the information that advancing instrumentation technology has unleashed.

"The thing that is probably most important is that people often spend much of their time just trying to find the right data, and that data can be incredibly expensive - US$100 million (Dh367.3m) for a large-scale seismic survey," said Gene Minnich, the vice president of Landmark. Halliburton, for one, is therefore building software platforms, as well as drilling platforms, to aid its quest for more efficient oil and gas output.

"Landmark has delivered a solution that will fundamentally change how exploration and production subsurface professionals will work," said Dave Lesar, the chairman, president and chief executive of Halliburton, based in Houston and Dubai. This week marked the Middle East launch of Landmark's new software suite designed to streamline technology workflows. The technology is intended to provide a virtual workspace in which teams of technical experts can collaborate on their painstaking geological detective work.

"By focusing on technology and process innovation, we have delivered a collaborative environment that is already making users more productive, and empowering them with greater insight into their subsurface challenges," said Mr Lesar. Last month a survey by the software giant Microsoft and the international business consultancy Accenture found that oil companies were "calling for a simpler and more unified computing environment to help them manage information overload".

"The sheer volume of upstream information produced by today's digital oilfield environment has prompted oil and gas professionals to call for systems and processes that drive better decision-making and job performance," said Ali Ferling, the managing director of worldwide oil and gas industry for Microsoft. "Information overload in the form of siloed, redundant and unstructured data often hinders proactive operations and collaboration," he said.

Halliburton is hoping its foray into software development will help oil producers with another big problem: recruiting the next generation of petroleum geologists, geophysicists and engineers as the old guard retires. The collaborative virtual workspace that Landmark offers shares similarities with the popular social networking platforms with which young professionals are familiar and have come to expect, said Mr Minnich.