A Fortune 100 multi-national petrochemical company with tens of thousands of employees in dozens of countries. Their goal is to leverage advanced technologies to create a future built on sustainable energy.
Oil and Gas
Case Study
Customer Profile
Challenge
The company has exploration teams made up of geoscientists and petrochemical engineers that analyze petabytes (PBs) of subsurface data to inform where they should drill for oil. While the company owns massive amounts of subsurface data, the speed and accuracy of analysis is significantly hindered by data silos across their organization. Since data is stored in physical IT environments throughout the world, it is difficult for exploration teams to access the data when they need it. Even when they can obtain approvals for access, it is cumbersome to transfer PBs of data for analysis.
Prior to the company’s engagement with 47Lining, it would take exploration teams roughly seven months to gather the required information before they could begin analysis and interpretation. Even then, they were only able to leverage approximately five percent of the available data, leading to unrealized opportunities to increase the quality of analysis and interpretation.
Given the competitive nature of their industry, this pace was unacceptable. As such, the company sought a cloud-based solution that would allow them to make all of their data securely discoverable and accessible, enabling explorers to analyze data faster and increase the accuracy of their predictions. Their goal was to accelerate the exploration process from seven months to three weeks.
Solution
Why 47Lining on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
To build a competitive advantage, this company wanted a solution that allowed them to truly own their data and leverage a wide variety of data sources. During the company’s search for a new solution, 47Lining and AWS presented a demonstration of the data platform using the company’s actual subsurface data. In the demo, 47Lining and AWS presented advanced map-based search capabilities, asset discovery, and in-depth analytics on subsets of the exploration team’s data. These capabilities demonstrated the speed and accuracy that the petrochemical company sought. As such, they decided to proceed with the development of a production implementation.
Establishing a global analytics solution
Since the demo, 47Lining has deployed a team of engineers on-site with the petrochemical company. These engineers have helped the company move from pilot to production, truly becoming a part of the client’s team.
Together, they built a petabyte-scale, microservices-based data platform atop underlying AWS services to ingest and analyze subsurface data. 47Lining has also developed web services on top of the data platform to handle data management, governance, search, and discovery. Additionally, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities help expedite the exploration process by automating repetitive tasks in the exploration process, such as detecting image similarities in maps and identifying salt traps. This enabled explorers to uncover viable drilling locations at an accelerated rate, and with greater accuracy.
The diagram below shows how the teams work together and the value that the data platform provides.
Results
While still in the process of rolling out the solution at global scale, 47Lining has helped the company significantly increase the throughput of subsurface data for interpretation, enhanced the accuracy of hydrocarbon presence predictions, and lowered the risk of investments on dry wells.
