Published: 12/13/2013
Published: 12/13/2013
YPF—Argentina’s national oil company—has generated a significant volume of project data relating to its Neuquén basin exploration studies. The Neuquén basin has been producing for over a century. Today, its shale reservoirs are being explored for additional oil and gas resources.
Located in central-west Argentina, the Neuquén basin is flanked by the Sierra Pintada uplift to the northeast, the North Patagonia massif to the south, and the Andean orogenic belt to the west. The basin is home to the Vaca Muerta petroleum system, which comprises source beds up to 1200 m thick.
YPF’s Unconventional Exploration group was challenged with storing and integrating significant volumes of unconventional exploration data, so that multidisciplinary experts could collaborate efficiently. The company also wanted to ensure that knowledge could be easily preserved and that quality control was central to any new system.
The Unconventional Exploration group met with Schlumberger to discuss solutions. It became clear that the Studio E&P knowledge environment would deliver the ability to centrally integrate all available information, enable users to easily capture project knowledge in the context of their daily workflow, guarantee data quality, and significantly improve collaboration between multidisciplinary teams.
Following infrastructure assessment and benchmarking tests, the team implemented the Studio environment. YPF’s exploration data was then validated and quality checked and fed into the system. Finally all users and data managers were given training on the system.
The Studio environment allowed the YPF Unconventional Exploration group to manage information from basin to prospect scale, while also capturing vital knowledge to maximize productivity. Geoscientists and engineers can find, review, and use exploration information, in the context of their workflows. All data now resides in the centralized and fully integrated Studio environment. Collaboration is significantly improved—team members can communicate via instant messaging, session share with experts, and add knowledge such as notes
or analogues to data.
Users publish results and updates to the team when they are ready—members subscribe to receive notifications of changes. The environment allows YPF exploration team members to annotate project windows—adding text, documents, images, and video—as well as quality tag interpretations to highlight confidence level and depth of analysis, and embed the context and calculations behind particular interpretation decisions.
Knowledge is captured and retained, making everything available to future teams and new staff. YPF’s data managers can use Studio apps to administer, browse, correct, and organize E&P data. They can quickly evaluate the state of their environment, including determining repository status, reviewing recent user activity, and identifying and completing critical data management tasks. The Studio environment also delivers awareness tools for quick access to key indicators on any repository, as well as 2D and 3D viewers, to view data in project context.
“The Studio solution has helped organize our unconventional exploration database efficiently. High volumes of data from multiple sources can now be easily shared by our geoscientists, through robust collaboration tools the platform offers. Key improvements have also been seen in our data integration capability, workflow efficiencies, and multidisciplinary teamworking. The benefits have been so significant that our management team decided to expand the scope of the project to other targets in the basin.”
Fernanda Raggio, Senior Geologist Exploration Team Leader for YPF Unconventional Exploration
Challenge: Efficient storage, integration, and collaboration over high volumes of unconventional exploration data.
Solution: Introduce the Studio E&P knowledge environment to
Results: Enabled
