Organised jointly by TNO and Texas A&M, students learned about
the various aspects of Intelligent Oil Fields, including new sensor
technologies, oil & gas well design, and IT systems.
In keeping with the changing times, TNO, one of Europe’s largest independent companies in the areas of technology development, and Texas A&M University at Qatar’s Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Student Chapter, organised an Intelligent Oil & Gas Field workshop, last week. Intelligent Oil and Gas Field technologies are increasingly used by oil and gas companies to increase the recovery, production and efficiency of oil and gas fields through a range of new sensors and ICT technologies.
In the workshop, students learned about the various aspects of Intelligent Oil Fields, including new sensor technologies, oil & gas well design, and IT systems. This also included the use of new technologies, such as intelligent devices to control inflow from the reservoir into the oil and gas production wells.
The students applied the lessons they learned and worked in teams to develop their own intelligent field in a design contest. In the design contest, teams were faced with real-life working situations, as can be found in the industry. They had to work together as teams to deal with cost aspects and time constraints to come up with a winning solution. Apart from technology, the workshop focused on collaborative work among various disciplines, essential to improve decision-making in an oil field’s operation.
Anton Leemhuis, Managing Director of TNO’s Doha-based Middle East branch, told Community, “The success of the fifth edition of this annual workshop highlights the importance of Intelligent Fields for realising efficiency gains and cost savings in the oil and gas industry, especially in times when prices of oil and gas are low.”
The workshop was attended by engineering students from Texas A&M University at Qatar, and Qatar University. One of the attendees, Mohamad Abdul Ghani from Texas A&M at Qatar’s SPE student chapter, said, “This workshop is a very good opportunity for students to learn about new technology used in oil and gas fields. I hope we can continue organising this event in the coming years.”
With the industry constantly on the lookout to change the way it produces oil and gas, Intelligent Oil Field technologies seem to be fast catching the fancy of the exploration and production wings. Tom Busking, technical consultant at TNO, said, “This workshop familiarises students with intelligent field technologies at an early stage. This is important given that they are the future users of these technologies that are becoming commonplace in the oil and gas industry.”
Intelligent Oil Field is known by many names, including ‘Digital Oilfield’, ‘Field o’ the Future’, ‘i-Field’, ‘e-Field’, ‘Real-time Ops’, and ‘Real-time Optimisation’. According to a piece Making the most of the digital oil field written by Chris Lo, for the website offshore-technology: “Despite some industry resistance, the digital oil field concept is helping oil and gas companies drive offshore innovation and optimisation. Now that data analysis and wireless technologies are readily available to the industry, companies must ask themselves how they can make the most of the new information age. As the era of ‘easy oil’ draws to a close, the long-established concept of the digital oil field is gaining more and more traction in the oil and gas industry.
For operators struggling to maximise profitability, especially those tapping costly and risk-intensive deep water wells, the upfront cost of investing in modern information technologies is becoming an increasingly worthwhile trade-off for safer, more efficient, better-managed operations.”
The somewhat nebulous concept of Intelligent Oil Field, focuses mostly on leveraging the benefits of modern IT, automation and communications to enhance all the conventional aspects of oil and gas operations, from exploration and production to environmental monitoring and safety, Lo points out.
“But more than simply deploying digital and data management technologies, Digital Oil Field is about unifying disparate oil field processes into a more easily digestible stream of information, making it easier to get the big picture on an operation and thus optimise productivity in real-time, while minimising the industry’s labour-intensive, hard-copy hassles,” he says, adding that the Intelligent Oil Field technology market has steadily grown over the years.