Drilling Data Management

As the age of easy oil in Mexico is coming to an end, exploration and production activity is gradually moving to new frontiers. This not only requires the introduction of innovative technologies, but Mexico’s production decline also created a sense of urgency to discover new reserves and reduce time to first oil. In response to these challenges, Petrolink has created the Mexico Software Development Program that decreases the time between exploration and production by tailoring IT applications to enhance information availability in the drilling process.

“The drilling process presents a series of important challenges for the oil industry, since it is the core operation behind oil production,” says Adrehny León, Engineering Supervisor of Petrolink. “Drilling locations and objectives have become more complex with time. This has forced companies in the drilling market to gather different methods and technologies through new practices and software applications to optimize the entire process.” All this is enabled by the analysis information, which companies such as Petrolink provide.

“As a neutral and independent player, our objective in the Mexican oil and gas industry is to collect, display, and maximize the benefits of the data acquired,” explains Pablo Pérez, Executive VP for Business Development and former Country Manager Mexico of Petrolink. “Our company provides data and engineering technical support in a way that every decision made can be taken with the sights set on attaining planned geological objectives, keeping the well’s integrity in its mechanical state, and reaching the volumetric success that the well is committed to,” adds León.

In order to provide companies with the basics needed to optimize their decision-making process, data needs to fulfill two different qualities: it needs to be well integrated, and has to be expedited into relevant information sets that can be interpreted by any company. “Integration plays a vital role, since an emphasized set of data serves as the foundation for the decision-making process,” Armando Almeida, Chief District of Reforma-Comalcalco-Cárdenas of Petrolink describes. “At Petrolink, we collect the data, process it, and integrate it into data sets that are sent to the engineering division. Our team of engineers then  analyzes it and turns it into focused information related to clients’ objectives of reducing drilling time.”

The ability to convey the meaning of that information constitutes the second step in Petrolink’s purpose. “The quality of interpretability in information plays a crucial role in the ability of our clients to analyze data in a timely manner and use it for predictions and geomodeling,” Pablo Pérez explains. “We are very committed to XML language – which is an industry data standard coordinated by  Energistics – and this allows us to share information in an easy way for our clients to understand it, since the standard is free and is the dominating meta-language in business data management. Sharing might be challenging, since we are in a very competitive market, but we believe that most companies are open to data exchange and cooperation. This leads us to believe that cooperation is beneficial for everyone in the business,” he says.

Enhanced access to drilling data through easily interpretable information sets also has implications for how Pemex can best face the current and upcoming challenges in deepwater. “We have experience in deepwater in the Gulf of Mexico and other locations in Europe, which is why we have deployed the Mexico Software Development Program,” Pérez describes. “We have identified the cost savings that the implementation of our integrated services for running real-time operation centers could have on deepwater. We could help clients save somewhere around 1% of their budget in deepwater operations. The savings opportunity is massive if you consider that a couple of days of operations offshore could end up costing US$1 million.”

“The future for Petrolink is related to innovating and applying knowledge and technology in an efficient and profitable way, so clients can get added-value in the way they face new extraction challenges.” Samuel Pérez, Operations Manager Mexico of Petrolink concludes. “We want to collaborate more with Pemex and other Mexican companies to help develop knowledge and facilitate training and education, because at the end of the day our core business is technology as a means to foster the growth of the Mexican oil and gas market and find new opportunities,” adds Pablo Pérez.