Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC)—the state oil company of India—was opening a new regional office from which to manage exploration activities in the South Diyur block in Egypt, and wanted to modernize its data management and project collaboration.

Project information and data was being entered into various unconnected repositories, while interpretation was undertaken by individuals working alone with little collaboration between team members. There was no single data location or standardized process in place, leading to a duplication of effort and poor data quality. There was also no ability to preserve project knowledge.

GSPC needed a solution for the new regional office that would centralize exploration project data management, standardize and improve all related quality processes, and drive collaboration between geologists and geophysicists.

Central integration

It became clear that the Studio E&P knowledge environment would support central integration of all available information, enable knowledge capture and preservation in workflow context, guarantee data quality, and significantly improve collaboration between multidisciplinary teams. GSPC exploration teams already used the Petrel E&P software platform for exploration projects, but were not optimizing its capabilities. To address this, the Schlumberger team designed and deployed key Petrel workflows for regional and prospect-level evaluation, then implemented the Studio E&P knowledge environment.

After assessing site and data status, the team installed and configured essential hardware and software. Exploration data was then gathered from all existing repositories and quality checked. New, centralized Studio data repositories were created and populated, and associated user access levels defined. Finally, training was provided to users and data managers.

Improved project efficiency

All data now resides in the centralized, fully integrated Studio environment. Since all seismic data is loaded into a single project for realization, the new system allows all seismic cubes to be realized just once—results are saved to a shared folder accessible by all users, removing the need for repeated realization. Data is properly secured and backed up, while standardized workflows ensure data quality and remove duplications. Collaboration is also significantly improved—team members can add knowledge such as notes or analogues to data.

Team members can now subscribe to receive results and updates as they are published. It is also now possible to annotate project windows (add text, documents, images, and video),as well as quality tag interpretations.

GSPC's realization processes had taken up to three days for larger cubes, but with the new system in place this time had been reduced to around two hours, significantly improving efficiency and reducing costs. Knowledge is now captured and retained, so nothing is lost for future teams and new staff. GSPC's data managers can use the Studio environment to administer, browse, correct, and organize E&P data.

The Studio environment also delivers awareness tools to manage asset team data, including 2D and 3D viewers, to see data in project context. The new system has helped GSPC drill a number of new wells in South Diyur with confidence.