OSIsoft White Paper "Impacting the Bottom Line" in O&G

Impacting the bottom line
10 real-world examples of oil and gas
innovators using data for economic effect
In a new era of heightened oil-price volatility,
data and technology are crucial in helping
operators cut costs and maximise value.

2
A
s everybody in the oil industry knows, it’s battling
against low crude prices, tougher regulations,
alternative forms of fuel and power, and rising
upstream costs. From China to Libya, operators in many
of the major oil-producing nations are struggling to achieve
breakeven costs of production and most analysts believe
things will get worse before they get better.
This is why many operators are sweating every last dollar
of value from their physical infrastructure just to break even
on the cost of production. But there’s only so much value
which can be wrung out of physical assets and the smartest
operators are turning to a new kind of infrastructure to
face today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. It’s called data
infrastructure. And it’s this technology which relays vital
information from great depths, provides 24/7 monitoring of
the condition of mission-critical equipment, monitors for
safety issues and much else.
But important as this information is, operators are
drowning in fragmented, critical, time-series data pouring
out of multiple and diverse systems that don’t talk to each
other. The burning imperative now is how to harness all
this vital information and convert it to data you can use.
The OSIsoft PI System does this—and it’s been doing it
for years. The PI System provides a platform that converts
an ever-mounting deluge of data into a coherent whole
that allows operators to save money, meet regulatory
requirements and improve safety. Some E&P users of the
PI System have cut barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d)
costs by up to 2-5% while others have cut their controllable
margin in logistics by 1-5%. In the hard-hit North Sea,
some operators have halved average unit operating costs in
the last two years, from $29.70 per barrel ($/b) to $15.30/b.
In this paper you’ll find enlightening case studies of what
PI System can do.
Achieving
more with less

3
W
hen the Polar Vortex hits the Midwest and
Eastern Seaboard of America, dumping
temperatures to 40F below, Columbia Pipeline
(now part of TransCanada) is ready, despite its more than
15,000 miles of pipelines spanning 16 states from New York
to the Gulf of Mexico. That’s because the TransCanada-
owned group relies on enterprise analytics in the form of
the PI System to keep the gas flowing to its domestic and
industrial customers.
As the company reports, the consequent gains in time,
money and man-hours from a PI System-based enterprise
analytics is considerable. The cost savings between 2006 and
2016 from the kind of preventive actions that are enabled by
its data infrastructure reached a cumulative $10m.
But, as Emily Rawlings, the group’s engineering manager
of system reliability, acknowledged at the time of one of
the biggest Polar Vortex events, the confidence that comes
from being able to weather the storms goes far beyond the
bottom line. “There are great intangible benefits”, she told a
presentation. “The customer confidence [that was created]
was huge.”
And Columbia has endured the worst Polar Vortex events.
In November 2014, before temperatures fell to the lowest
levels since 1976, the group had installed the PI System
which gathers, absorbs, processes and analyses data that
enables engineers to monitor in split seconds the way the gas
is flowing. As the hostile weather loomed, Columbia Pipeline
had every reason to be concerned. As AccuWeather chief
meteorologist Elliot Abrams forecast at the time, “the Arctic
blast will have the greatest shock in the central states.” And
yet there was no interruption to gas flows.
How does enterprise analytics work? Essentially, it employs
advanced digitised technology to extract data that companies
such as Columbia Pipeline need to know. By harnessing and
presenting the data in ways that allow operators to “see”
into the efficient functioning of the entire system, enterprise
Damage
limitation

4
analytics helps forestall blips in operations among other
applications.
As a result, the quality of decision-making is greatly
enhanced as engineers can access a wider range of real-time
information that enables them to respond to events, major
and minor, with confidence.
It’s all about certainty. As Chevron Pipe Line Company,
another OSIsoft customer, puts it, enterprise analytics
closes the gap between “I think” and “I know”. And when a
company is producing more than 1.3m b/d of crude, refined
products and chemicals through 4,100 miles of pipes, as
Chevron Pipe Line Company does, it’s a lot more comforting
to “know” rather than to “think”.
Safeguards
Enterprise analytics is about a lot more than protection against
storms however. No oil and gas installation, whatever its
nature, can run efficiently 100% of the time and, if problems
occur, it’s important to know what has happened and why.
In mid-2016, Columbia Pipeline engaged OSIsoft again to
deliver a real-time system for “intelligent maintenance”. With
a compression fleet grown to 1.2m horsepower, maintenance
and operational efficiency had become paramount.
Today, executives and front-line staff can see what’s
happening on dashboards. More than 7,000 mission-critical
streams of data are tapped to provide the big picture of the
compression assets. Visibility has increased steadily to 98%.
As Hungary’s MOL Group, another long-term PI System
user, recognises, visibility is everything. The PI system has
become a vital tool in the safe operation of its refineries that
produce around 417,000 barrels a day. As the group’s head
of process and automation, Tibor Comroczki, explains, in
the event of a potentially dangerous malfunction the system
dispatches operationally critical data about what happened
and automatically logs it for subsequent analysis. As
Comroczki points out, “it’s extremely important to have up-
to-date information about the state of the safeguard system,
which safety function was activated, when and why.”
Over the years, the entire group has replaced its
cumbersome paper-based reporting processes with PI’s
electronic format until today the system is the backbone of
MOL’s event management architecture.
Eyes on the ground
In the battle to lower production costs, all-round situational
awareness is essential. And one of the breakthroughs in
enterprise analytics is the ability it provides to visualise
precisely what’s going on inside operations, however big
and complex those operations are.
$10m: Cumulative cost
savings enabled by data
infrastructure between
2006 and 2016

5
Kongsberg Maritime
Norway-based Kongsberg Maritime is a specialist in deep-
sea exploration for the oil and gas industry. With 58 offices
in 20 countries, it also provides services to 18,000 vessels.
It’s a big and diverse company that’s been in business for
70 years and in all that time reliability has been Kongsberg’s
watchword. The PI System is fundamental to the company’s
historic goal.
At the heart of Kongsberg’s operations is a purpose-
designed information management system―the data
infrastructure―that enables operational staff to see in
real time what’s happening in its most critical functions around
the world. For example, in its offshore drilling operations the
PI System enables Kongsberg to monitor wellhead fatigue in
real time. It maximises the operational efficiency of the drilling
riser. And it adjusts work programs according to the weather,
sometimes on a minute by minute basis. And that’s just a few
of the virtues that the PI System brings to Kongsberg.
Taking wellhead fatigue as an example, the PI System
effectively provides a running commentary on its status by
absorbing a mass of information from undersea sensors
and transmiting the data to the control room.
Similarly, in the case of Kongsberg’s sea-going fleet, the
PI system constantly analyses for cylinder status, leakage in
the piston rings and exhaust valves, and performance of the
injection system among other vital functions. And because
it’s of little use to be overloaded with data and not know
what it all means, the system “visualises” the status of the
engines and for good measure notifies the nature and pattern
of any faults.
In short, Kongsberg Maritime’s control room has a running
prognosis of the state of engine components in much the same
way that racing cars are monitored during an F1 grand prix.
And it all shows up on a dash board that, to the trained eye,
is as informationally friendly as the dials on a family saloon.
This is the kind of coherently organised data that enables
big savings.
That’s why California’s Pacific Gas and Electricity opted
for the PI System. With 43 miles of distribution and 4,500
remote terminal units (RTUs) continuously transmitting data
to a central control system, it’s essential to get a system-wide
picture of all operations.
To give PG&E that picture, OSIoft came up with a video
wall. Tools such as video walls constitute one of the most
valuable advances in the technology of exploration and
production because they provide actionable knowledge, stuff
operators need to know. In PG&E’s case, the video wall
was installed in the gas distribution control centre where it
converts a non-stop avalanche of data into valuable insights.
For instance, operators can see at a glance how well the
compressors are operating and issue instructions in the
confidence that the data on which they’re basing decisions
is accurate.
This is situational awareness. Because they can see pretty
much everything that’s going on, operators can fix things
before they cause problems.
With 43 miles of distribution
and 4,500 remote terminal units
continuously transmitting data,
it’s essential to get a system-wide
picture of operations

6
W
hen Tullow Oil turned on its technology assisted
production system known as TAPS in the remote
Jubilee field in the Gulf of Guinea, offshore West
Africa, it unleashed a stream of actionable data that the group
has exploited ever since to extract maximum value from these
isolated assets. So useful has TAPS been that it’s given the
company the confidence to develop the deepwater Ten field
in the same area.
As the group acknowledges, the level of comfort provided
by TAPS is vital to operations. “Without the real-time data
and analysis tools provided by TAPS it would not have been
possible to optimise the Jubilee wells and carry out continuous
effective well and reservoir management,” says Tullow’s
project manager Mark Whitehouse.
The gains have come right across the board. The group
estimates that TAPS has saved millions of dollars in the
maintenance of the multi-phase flow metering system alone.
Based on the PI System, from conception to execution
Tullow’s digital solution was developed within just 12 months.
But what exactly is TAPS? Summarised, it’s a system for
delivering data you can’t do without. And especially when
the data is gathered from a depth of 1,250m, roughly 50kms
off the coast.
Tullow attributes to TAPS a range of benefits. By
automating a lot of routine jobs such as alerting engineers
about choke settings and well status, it frees up time for
more creative work that adds value to the field. And in such
a challenging location, there’s a lot of this kind of work. With
many of the inspection chores done for them, engineers can
put their heads together to resolve technical problems that,
if not fixed, could reduce productivity.
But how does TAPS work? With the PI system at its heart,
it’s essentially a ship-to-shore tool that gathers raw real-time
data from strategically placed sensors and transmits it to
programmable logic controllers (PLCs) application modules.
The data passes through a screen at the control centre
before being relayed through a server and collected by PI.
These modules process the resulting stream of information—
Long way
from anywhere…

7
for example about the state of the wellheads—and organise
it into a shape that delivers important insights. All this
happens offshore.
Next, the data is transmitted by satellite onshore to Accra,
Ghana’s capital, where it flashes up on seven dedicated
screens in easily visualised form. At this point Tullow has data
it can use—and data is something it uses a lot of. Because the
information is so accessible and designated employees see the
same data, the company says TAPS facilitates collaboration
between different functions.
Armed with the lessons the group has learned from TAPS
in the Jubilee field, Tullow is applying the system in the TEN
area comprising Tweneboa, Enyenra and Ntomme. There
won’t be any new drilling in the area pending the resolution
of a two-year maritime dispute between the Ivory Coast and
Ghana now before the International Tribunal of the Law
of the Sea, but meantime Tullow is using TAPS to boost
production from existing wells.
Dynamic data
Plagued by unplanned shutdowns and production losses
in the Erb West field 60kms off the coast of Malaysia,
Petronas Carigali turned to the PI System a few years
ago. The oil major’s main problem in trouble-shooting
these interruptions was what it called stagnant data that
continually frustrated attempts to restore production.
It used to take three weeks before engineers onshore
received information about an incident in the field and
could then present a report to management. Once a
decision could be made, travel to the site had to be
arranged. By then, the situation might have worsened
with consequent increases in cost and difficulty of repair.
Also, since the technical information engineers were
given was often inadequate, it made troubleshooting more
challenging. Lacking a digital database containing historical
information that provided a perspective on which they
could rely, engineers often went into action inadequately
equipped. Sometimes there was no process data available
at all, or it might be hard to access because it was trapped
in isolated control systems.
“[They were] not able to predict the potential problem
[affecting] critical equipment or process instrumentation
as there was no real-time monitoring system available,”
explains Petronas instrumentation engineer Musreen
Azwan. Thus engineers often had to work blind.
That’s now all changed. A full panoply of PI System
tools was deployed including interfaces, notifications,
servers, system management and learning channels.
As a result, troubleshooting has become faster, easier and
more effective. With much of the work automated―for
instance in terms of real-time process information, safe
and critical operating limits, instead of having to be
gathered by human labour, a lot of highly-paid hours have
been saved. “[The system] has given significant return
of investment in terms of savings in labour hours and
unplanned shutdown time,” the group confirms.
Above all, engineers can now identify mounting
problems and fix them before they affect production.
Petronas Carigali’s capacity for mitigation has increased
exponentially. As Azwan puts it, “stagnant data has
been turned into a flow of profitable information.” Call it
dynamic data.
So impressed has Petronas Carigali been by the
results that it’s progressively installing the PI System
in remote sites across all its offshore operations.
Without the real-time data
provided by TAPS it would not
have been possible to optimise
the Jubilee wells

8
A
s Abu Dhabi’s biggest gas company, Dolphin Energy,
is well aware, one of the biggest challenges faced by
energy providers is environmental, health and safety
compliance. Get it wrong and penalties are certain.
But Dolphin Energy has the extra pressure of satisfying
the ideals of its chairman, His Highness Sheikh Hamdan
Bin Zayed Al Nahayan. As he puts it: “We cherish our
environment because it is an integral part of our country,
our history and our heritage.”
This worthy goal requires an advanced informational
infrastructure based on complex calculations and detailed
reporting that involves all functions. Comprehensive
documentation must be available for third-party auditors.
All methodologies employed must be accurate and verifiable.
And the data must be rock-solid.
Not surprisingly, until a few short years ago Dolphin Energy
fell short of the chairman’s goals. The original EHS system,
which was based on real-time monitoring of continuous
emissions and fuel gas flow meters, was labour-intensive,
consuming far too many man-hours with disappointing results.
Also, as the company’s Dr. Rola Atiyeh, senior manager for
environment and sustainability, acknowledged, it was unreliable
for reporting purposes, particularly as regulations become
more onerous and production increased. Dolphin Energy
produces an average daily volume of 2bn cubic feet (cf) of
gas to customers such as Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity,
the latter alone taking an average 99m scf a day.
OSIsoft stepped into the breach with the PI System. It
deployed its latest-generation tools including performance
equations, system management, tag configurators, data links
and the process book, the latter being a solution-oriented
service that allows users to review multiple sets of data and
quickly identify ways of enhancing the quality of data.
Working with Trinity Consultants and Dolphin Energy’s
environmental department, automation engineers, operational
groups, process and application engineers, the instrument
department, laboratory technicians, and outside consultants,
OSIsoft developed a system that today delivers all the data
relating to emission rates, carbon footprints, gas flares, gas
temperatures, fuel usage and general efficiency among other
requirements.
Safer,
cleaner,
greener
Game of tags
Around the same time as Dolphin Energy was developing
its EHS architecture, on the other side of the world in
Canada, Suncor Energy was faced with a health and safety
issue that was wasting important operational time.
The group had been using bypass tags to monitor and
audit the safety-critical movement of personnel at two
key operations―Firebag and MacKay River that employ
steam-assisted gravity drainage techniques.
The system had however got out of control with
thousands of bypass tags issued, resulting in too many false
alarms that took key staff away from more important work.
Worried that that health and safety was being compromised,
Suncor management called in OSIsoft to see what it could
do. “It is very important to continuously monitor and audit
safety-critical bypasses as they compromise the functions to
protect humans and the environment,” underlines Suncor’s
manager of applications and infrastructure, Tripto Somani.
A few months later, the PI System was deployed with
the desired results and has been applied more widely ever
since. Now spread over four sites, it also covers Suncor’s
oil sands operations. As Somani explains, the company’s
key performance indicators show that the group complies
fully with energy and environmental regulatory reporting
as well as safety issues.
And staff aren’t caught up in wild goose chases.
The benefits fell straight to the bottom line. “We did the
project to ensure the air emissions calculation system can
produce reliable data for all air emission reporting including
corporate key performance indicators,” explains
Dr. Atiyeh. “The new system will save us a lot of time
in quality assurance and quality control. It is accurate,
verifiable and documented by scientific methodologies.”
As Trinity Consultants’ Sue Sung explains: “In short,
[Dolphin Energy] has 100%-validated data that meets
regulator’s requirements in the compliance and reporting
of environmental health and safety.”

9
A
s the oil and gas industry searches at ever greater
depths for the energy that sustains the global
economy, it becomes proportionately more
important—and challenging—to know exactly how effectively
equipment is functioning far below the earth’s surface.
And that’s particularly true about drilling rates.
Here’s how Marathon Oil halved from 24 days to 12 days
the average time it took to get from spud to total depth.
Marathon Oil had been working the difficult Eagle Ford
field in Texas for many years. At Eagle Ford, oil is produced
at depths of 5,000 to 8,000 feet to the northwest while dry
gas is found at depths of 10,000 to 12,000 feet to the
southeast, making it difficult to drill and complete wells.
So tough are the technical challenges that over the years
even experienced operators ran into insurmountable
problems and went exploring in easier locations.
In 2011, Marathon first began to apply the PI System
tool box including MaraDrill and Spotfire. The results
weren’t long in coming. Within two years the crews
had knocked 50% off the average drilling rate and were
approaching 15,000 feet a day, significantly better than
industry norms.
Up-to-the-minute data
The secret is knowing what’s happening in real time at the
sharp end. In every single second crews get a flow of insights—
between 20-30 bits of data—that tell them how quickly and
effectively they are drilling. Rate of penetration, weight on
the bit, revolutions per minute, rate of mud flow among other
measurements: the data appears on screens in easily understood
form. If the drill’s slipping, they know. If it’s sticking, they know.
Sensors provide the vital feedback that creates this running
commentary of progress from a long way down. Integrated
with Spotfire visualization, the crews literally acquire a picture
of how they’re doing at any moment of the day or night. Thus
they can react quickly if anomalies show up on the screen.
As a bonus the management get much better visibility. Not
only is it now possible to measure the relative performance of
crews, executives can better understand the reasons for any
production delays and idle drilling time.
Visibility
at 2500
metres…

10
A step change for Talisman
Talisman Energy is another company that has had a long
and beneficial relationship with the PI System that every year
saves many days in lost production.
Back in 2001, Talisman realised it was vulnerable in its
North Sea operations to the reliability of its ever-growing
portfolio of rotating equipment, much of which operated at
considerable depths. Important though the drilling process is,
oil and gas companies need to know how well all their hard-
worked equipment is functioning. Because there are so many
different and interconnected types of machinery in offshore
exploration, a malfunction in any one of them can quickly
lead to knock-on failures and lost production. As far as
Talisman was concerned, prevention was the best cure.
After installing its first PI System on a single sub-sea
well, Talisman was so impressed by the results that the group
began to apply it more widely. Under a project called REEP
(for rotating equipment excellence programme), Talisman
used PI to monitor the performance of precisely 2,831 pieces
of machinery ranging from diesel-driven fire pumps and
emergency power generation packages to ballast pumps,
gas turbines and compressors and main oil line pumps.
In so many words, the purpose was to deliver the data
that enables engineers to keep all these complex pieces of
engineering up and running.
Reaping the rewards
Once the PI System was in full operation, Talisman quickly
reaped the rewards. When a gas filter got fouled and
threatened to blow out, Spotlight alerted the onshore base
who deployed a crew to replace it with a standby filter. The
estimated saving in lost production was 14 days. Similarly,
the system picked up a seal on an oil tank that was registering
nearly twice its correct temperature. The resulting fix saved
about ten days in lost production.
In today’s depressed oil market, it’s these insights that can
make all the difference between breakeven costs of production
or loss.
Talisman Energy is another
company that has had a long
and beneficial relationship
with the PI System

11
The PI system is a platform on
which hundreds of data-driven
applications and services
can be mounted which
provide executives with
the certainty they need to
make commercial decisions
Coherency
counts
A
s the examples in this paper show the industry
needs all the data it can get in the battle to break
even in a largely hostile commercial environment.
But, as OSIsoft has learned over the years from working
alongside these and many other companies, a flood of
conflicting information deriving from diverse systems and a
heterogenous array of units, protocols and formats can be
overwhelming and often leads to confused decision-making.
Put bluntly, data has to be banged into shape before
it’s useful. The PI System is a platform on which literally
hundreds of data-driven applications and services can be
mounted, all of them contributing to coherent insights that
provide executives and other levels of management with the
certainty they need to make sound commercial decisions.
And as data is piled on data, it often overwhelms systems
built for less information-rich times. That’s why we made
the PI System scalable so that it can grow with the demands
made on it.
Over the years the industry’s needs for data have
constantly grown and evolved. It must be delivered in
the same language, accessible anywhere on any kind of
device, predictive in a way that forestalls hostile events, and
organised so that it facilitates collaboration instead of being
buried unproductively in silos.
It’s this knowledge that underpins the PI System’s
universality—that’s why it’s deployed at over 17,000 sites
around the world.

ABOUT
OSIsoft, a global leader in operational intelligence, delivers
an open enterprise infrastructure to connect sensorbased
data, operations, and people to enable real-time and
actionable insights. As the maker of the PI System, OSIsoft
empowers companies across a range of industries in
activities such as exploration, extraction, production,
generation, process and discrete manufacturing,
distribution, and services to leverage streaming data
to optimizeand enrich their businesses. For over thirty
years, OSIsoft customers have embraced the PI System
to deliver process, quality, energy, regulatory compliance,
safety, security, and asset health improvements across
their operations. Founded in 1980, OSIsoft is a privately-
held company, headquartered in San Leandro, California,
U.S.A., with offices around the world.
For more information visit www.osisoft.com
To discover more uses of technology in oil and gas, visit our
dedicated website: http://www.osisoft.com/oil-and-gas/
email: oilandgas@osisoft.com
The companies, products, and brands mentioned are
trademarks of their respective trademark owners.
© Copyright 2017 OSIsoft, LLC | 1600 Alvarado Street, San
Leandro, CA 94577 | www.osisoft.com

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