“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.

Albert Einstein, as you may recall, was pretty good at understanding complex stuff like, say, the makeup of the universe, quantum physics and the like. It’s interesting that he’s the one who said that if you didn’t understand something well enough to explain it to your grandmother, you didn’t really understand it.

Well, I like to think of myself as something of an oilfield technology expert—I‘m even able to successfully explain it all to my Grandma, who totally ‘gets it’ now. So I hope I can explain its benefits to you in three basic steps. 

In the area of oilfield data, we know we’ve been sitting on a gold mine.

Well, sitting is not the right word, because we have been working on how to process all that information.

Have you seen the dashboards on today’s cars? The information they give you is amazing—you can almost get where you’re going by watching the dashboard alone. The idea, of course, is to consolidate information you need in order to stay safe; what’s behind you, beside you and in front of you and when they get too close.

DeltaV SaaS SCADA with Asset Protect software is a lot like that. It tells you the location of equipment like compressors, pumpjacks and other onsite equipment, along with pipeline inventory, preventative maintenance programs and more, so that’s what’s around you. It also lets you track moves of that equipment, so your information stays current and available to your people when they need it.

I don’t know about you, but I love the smell of freshly-baked bread. Or chocolate cake. Or cookies. There’s just nothing like tasting hot-from-the-oven baked goods!

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.

The cost of unplanned maintenance activities such as replacing or repairing failed equipment is high; lost production, expensive labor (call outs, overtime) and damaged equipment adds up.

Unplanned maintenance will always be a part of your maintenance strategy but to rely on it solely has a number of disadvantages that can greatly impact your oil and gas production, safety and sustainability.

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?