Signal Hill Petroleum is a privately owned energy company specializing in the sustainable exploration and development of oil and gas in urban areas. It manages over 400 active wells, mostly in the Long Beach oil field in the Los Angeles Basin, producing light and sweet oil. With a small team and a significant volume of new and historic data to handle (some wells are over 90 years old), Signal Hill was challenged with ensuring the quality of, and promoting efficient collaboration over, data from over 3,000 wellbores in the Long Beach field vicinity.

Signal Hill also needed to improve its data storage. Well, production, and injection information was stored in separate reference projects, requiring geoscientists to manually search through multiple paper sources to locate archived data. This proved to be time consuming and prevented the team from accessing the most recent information. Finally, as new projects were generated, older project data and interpretations were often lost.

Data strategy

After meeting with Schlumberger to discuss these challenges, it became clear that Signal Hill Petroleum would benefit greatly from the introduction of the Studio E&P knowledge environment—this would allow the company to reorganize, access, and collaborate on its data more effectively. A dedicated server was set up and configured to run the system, followed by a two-day data management training course for Signal Hill Petroleum’s G&G team covering data transfer, quality control, administration, and collaboration workflows.

The team implemented a Studio pilot repository to host all well, seismic, and cultural data objects. This repository was indexed to allow users to graphically view, filter, and transfer its content through the Petrel* E&P software platform. Trained users were granted repository read, write, and editing privileges to maintain asset team flexibility since data quality checks and corrections are a shared responsibility.

Increased storage and faster data transfer

After data was migrated to the repository, available network storage space increased by 30 percent, due to the immediate elimination of duplicated information. Data transfer times are also greatly improved and multiple users can simultaneously manage data in the master repository.

Automatic alerts allow instant data transmission and communication, keeping users up-to-date on repository changes. Any new data can be synchronized with a user’s project at the push of a button. Prior to the new Studio environment, this process would have taken weeks. Given the relatively small size of the Signal Hill team, these benefits had an immediate and significant impact. Studio has proved to be an enormous help for the team in keeping multiple data types structured and in control. The new repository enables Signal Hill to effortlessly share digital data in such a way that was previously impossible.

Smart indexing helps Signal Hill Petroleum employees access all project-relevant data—available instantly in graphical form whenever required. Well top management has also been significantly improved—preferences within the Studio environment now allow users to filter well tops based on interpreter hierarchy.