Oil/Gas and Big Data
Petrochemical companies perform site exploration to setup a new plant. To do that they perform geospatial, production and profitability analysis. After plant is setup they monitor the production operations, site and quality of
production. They manage inventory, transport and complete supply chain operation. They also deal with government regulations and geo political situations.
In each step petrochemical companies collect large amount of data from exploratory instruments, monitoring sensors, inventory management, supply chain transactions, news and social media. Big data can help these companies
make better decisions using data insights.
New Site Exploration
Petrochemical companies conduct site analysis by conducting geological surveys. They look for areas where sedimentary rocks, where changes of finding an oil reservoir is higher. They conduct magnetometer surveys to detect non magnetic
rocks. They conduct seismic analysis by using geo-phones and hydrophones.
During this exploration large amount of data is collected and analyzed. Earth layer models are built, porosity and permeability analysis is done to predict oil capacity, daily drilling output and profit. These companies can
utilize Hadoop to store large amount of sensor data for easy exploration. Companies can bring in geo-political and other external data sets to perform complete logistical and profitability analysis before going ahead with the project.
Predict & Manage Production
Petrochemical companies can collect daily production output, sensor data, weather, transport data and geo-political data and create models to observe production over time, understand what factors affect production and predict production
in future.
They can also integrate market prices for futures to predict well's profitability. Companies can conduct aging analysis and determine lifetime of the well and manage costs.
Operations
Petrochemical companies can utilize real time processing power of Big data solutions to detect errors from sensors or track patterns to predict failure. Social feeds could also be processed to protect assets from terrorist attacks
and natural calamity. Real time operational dashboards can be built for ops team so they can look at alerts and take necessary actions or provision automated actions.
For example companies can provision automated shutdown of the reservoir production in case of detected issues which could lead to environment safety issues.
