– 90 % of all subsurface data have been gathered within the last two years. At the same time, the oil and gas industry has not been capable of taking advantage of all this data compared to other industries.
Phillip Jong, Open Subsurface Data Universe Forum Chair and Manager Data Foundation Design at Shell Global Solutions, spoke at the DigEx 2020 conference in Oslo in January.
According to Jong, the industry can improve their value creation through digitalization, and the companies are increasingly waking up to this message.
Enter OSDU – the Open Subsurface Data Universe. A collaboration between well over a hundred oil, service and technology companies, that first saw the light of day in the spring of 2018.
– At the time, a handful of leading oil and gas companies (the OSDU Forum) came together and decided that we all needed a new data platform to utilize and process all the available data. We agreed that it was not beneficial to compete in this area, so instead, we chose collaboration.
The Forum will focus on developing a standard OSDU platform that will transform the way the industry stores, shares and analyze subsurface data. The platform will enable secure, reliable, global and performant access to all subsurface data for the companies.
In detail, according to Jong, the OSDU data platform will enable clear data ownership structures, standardize metadata for all relevant data types, define automatic data ingestion workflows, and provide search capability across all data types.
The first version, Release 1, was released late in 2019 and included some basic well data, basic search and visualization capabilities, along with documentation and instructions.
The upcoming Release 2 and Release 3 will expand the current platform and include more data and functions.
OSDU currently has 133 members, including the following operators: Anadarko, BHP Billiton Deepwater, BP, Cepsa, Chevron, Concho Resources, ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Hess, Marathon Oil, Noble Energy, Pandion Energy, PETROBRAS, PETRONAS, Reliance Industries, Shell, Total and Woodside.
