Oil and gas producers have been realizing the benefits of technology with SCADA, IIoT and sensors in the field for a long time now, and while these pieces have certainly been worth their weight in black gold to the bottom line (and safety) there is a new evolution coming soon to the oil field near you.

The goal line for oil and gas producers around the world is to take the digital transformation journey to ultimately gain all the many benefits of an autonomous oil and gas operation.

But should you take that journey?

This is not a journey for everyone. There is much to consider before you decide.

Maybe you’ve declared your intention to digitally transform your production. That’s great. It’s a growing trend and it will really boost efficiency. But the jury is still out on whether to do it in-house or to let us do it for you.

I have a question that may clarify that decision for you:

What are you good at?

You’re good at evaluating leases, considering how to economically produce a field and to get that oil and gas to market. If you were to jump into the field of developing a cloud based platform, what would that look like in terms of hiring, training and implementing?

 

You’ve been really busy lately; planning to design install and manage your own SCADA system. You've done all your homework, researched, endlessly read on the how to’s, precautions and potential disasters to avoid. You’re ready to invest your hard-earned money, and commit even more of your precious time into the next steps.

HMI (Human Machine Interface) – is really just the software application that presents information to an operator, or a user about the state of a process, then accepts and implements the operators’ control instructions.

This is usually displayed in a graphic format. But, it's that graphic format, and how well (or poorly) it's designed that can make all the difference. We, the humans as the users are generally visual learners. Which is just one of the reasons why our users love our HMI so much; hi-res, crystal clear graphics right in front of them that are easy to understand and give users the ability to make better business decisions.

 

Awhile back a friend decided to replace a leaky faucet himself and save some money. He thought the faucet was screwed on, so he grabbed a wrench and started twisting away.

After a couple of turns the faucet broke off, spewing water everywhere. It was sweated instead of screwed on, so he had to turn off all the water to the house and then call a plumber to fix his mistake. It would’ve been faster and simpler to have farmed out the work in the first place.

“Dear Producer,” the email should read. “I want to tell you about a problem I have on well number 10. It’s—well, it’s just not producing like it should. I think there may be a liquid loading problem. In truth, this has been building up for a while, and I was afraid something like this would happen. What should we do?”

I don’t know if you ever read advice columns, where people write in and ask for help with relationship issues. Sometimes it’s interesting to see what the columnist has to offer as a solution.

 

What if we could help you know about production issues instantly—anywhere in the world? 
What if all relevant personnel got that information in an easy-to-read dashboard at the same time? 
What if that same information system helped valves and pumps self-monitor so they required less oversight?

Times have been tough. We have all seen volatility and uncertainty in our industry over the past few years. Companies have been making changes to their structure and processes to be more efficient and less wasteful. Like most people in our industry, you probably have asked yourself how you can streamline your processes without sacrificing speed or quality. We’ve created several ways to help you do that. One that we'll dig into today is how to manage your lab sampling program with speed and ease to give you more time to focus on your core business.

This blog post has been updated as of May 4th, 2021

Several years ago I was at a customer site and there were two executives who were struggling to figure out if a field they recently purchased was producing as much as they were expecting.

They had over fifty reports in their system, but they didn't know where to look. It didn't help that they had multiple systems and each one had slightly different numbers. Everything this company did was electronic-based and they collected so much data that obviously they had this information somewhere. The big question, though, was where do you look?