Taking teamwork to the edge
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: Jennifer Pallanich
  Monday, April 07, 2008

Two service companies are bringing the wow factor back into viz rooms, real time centers, and executive briefing rooms. Both opened centers aimed at collaboration and innovation with the latest in high-definition viewing, techno-toys and creature comforts. It kind of makes the centers of yesterday seem, well, yesteryear. US editor Jennifer Pallanich checks out the facilities.

While the oil industry has talked often about collaboration, some believed it just wasn’t happening as much – or as well – as possible. Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) decided a new approach was in order and opened the Breakthrough Performance Center in Houston.

The center’s design encourages collaboration and innovation, says Kris Givens, SIS global marketing director, where Schlumberger, its customers, technology partners, universities and third-party service companies work together in an experimental environment to solve problems.

The center is aimed at showcasing, creating and testing digital technology innovations in the oil and gas industry, adds Givens. ‘It’s a place to try new things and take risks.’

Schlumberger believes a relaxed atmosphere that supports experimentation is just the way to encourage the great leaps of technology innovation it expects to see the teams in the Innovation Lab give birth to.

‘Imagine the possibilities here . . . The center allows users to unlock their creative energy trapped somewhere behind the structure of today’s process-intensive industry, releasing their inner child, if you will, and sharing ideas with other experts to come up with new possibilities,’ Givens says, adding the touch and play aspect of the center helps change the frame of mind to work in different ways.

The company plans to use Innovation Lab for multiple purposes, including bringing customers together with software engineers who work with Ocean, Schlumberger’s open development framework on which over 40 clients and partners are developing software applications that enable customization integrated within the Petrel seismic to simulation workflow.

Collaboration is a central theme to the facility.

‘There are several layers to that onion,’ Givens says, adding that access to experts at the service company and its horizontal technology partners allows a project team to finetune and maximize performance of a solution. ‘Collaboration takes place between people. A lot of times as an industry, we underestimate the importance of the way people interact with each other, while focusing solely on the technology aspects of a given work process.’

Historically, getting IT systems and software to work in complex secure networks with remote locations and satellites connectivity has been difficult, even in real time centers, Givens says. For instance, a customer may have challenges with system integration or performance issues requiring debugging software code, looking for network bottlenecks or security conflicts to get all the components to work in harmony and in real time, he explains. By recreating the customer’s environment in the center and supplying cutting edge technology and engineering know-how, the center sets the stage for innovative solutions by putting the resources needed to address those problems in one location.

In another scenario, he says, the center can be set up as a drillship in a remote location to test a new control system before using it live.

‘It all goes back to the laboratory concept,’ Givens says. ‘Let’s experiment, test, make sure it works, before we deploy and go live with it.’

The approach reduces risk associated with new technology before it goes into a customer environment, he says. ‘Whether you call it collaboration or innovation, it really encompasses the best of both.’

Clients can bring in their own hardware, servers or a whole rack of equipment, or use technology provided by IT partners in the center, depending on the issue they need to work on.

‘It’s very adaptable to accepting whatever they need to bring into the center to make it work,’ Givens says. Because the entire center is on an open network out to the internet, he says, customers can access the data on their networks through their security/VPN systems, and dedicated lines can be installed for projects with specific bandwidth requirements.

He gives the example of a customer who was an early Microsoft adopter and a long-time user of Schlumberger’s ECLIPSE reservoir simulator. Historically the reservoir simulator ran in parallel only on Linux clusters but was recently released on Microsoft cluster technology. The customer wanted to test and benchmark the performance of the simulator on the Microsoft cluster. Because Microsoft is one of the participating strategic partners in the center, Givens says, this task is one the center can easily accommodate.

‘We have dedicated people from all three companies working on it,’ Givens says. ‘With our new center, the customer and our partner have a facility that leverages all of our technologies together to make it work.’

Partners include Barco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Nvidia, Panoram, and the Whitlock Group.

The collaboration and innovation theme carries over from the innovation lab into the high end visualization rooms, video conference center and equipment associated with executive briefings.

The visualization room has two adjoining rooms with a removable partition to provide access to two separate projection systems that can be used in tandem or in combination. The collaboration area uses two Sony 4k projectors running 16.4 megapixels of stereo powered by a Panoram PixelBlaster solution on one screen and two Barco HD projectors running 4.1 megapixels of stereo powered by a Barco VR workroom solution on the other screen.

The Sony projectors display on a single high-contrast screen of 16x9ft glass. ‘It was actually so big we had to cut a hole in the side of the building to get it in,’ Givens says. He says the system allows users to see data relationships in a new way.

The system is a flexible way to display multiple sets of data at the same time, he says. He says this provides a visual integration uncommonly used in the viz rooms of today.

‘Building a culture around the center as a laboratory will keep people’s mindsets geared on trying new ideas,’ Givens says.

He isn’t concerned with the center becoming outdated. ‘That’s the beauty of the partnerships we have,’ he says, calling it collaboration in action. He says the IT partners ensure the center has the latest technology available. ‘Keeping it innovative is about keeping the technology fresh, keeping the mindset focused on experimentation, collaborating to innovate.’

The BPC, which opened in September, already has a brief backlog, Givens notes.

Seeing is believing

Halliburton took its own approach to collaboration by opening a new real time center in Houston that fully supports its strategy of enabling the digital asset.

‘We see it as an overall environment for oil companies, the service companies, and the individuals of these companies to interact and work together more effectively,’ says Peter Bernard, senior vice president for Halliburton.

The Edgar Ortiz Real Time Center gives clients secure access to information that they can passively watch while retaining the ability to intervene.

‘You can do many things here,’ says Bengisu Erenli, program manager for the digital asset for Halliburton. Based on information and collaboration through the real-time environment, she says, the operator can modify an original plan for optimal results.

‘You’re seeing things before they can actually cause problems,’ she says.

Halliburton opened its Ortiz Center in Houston in August. The center is named after Ortiz, president and CEO of Halliburton Energy Services from 2000 to 2002, who developed the vision of real time reservoir solutions in 1996 on a piece of paper while on a long flight. His vision was for people working across the globe and in different parts of the organization to be able to collaborate for efficient and effective operations. The center spans over 13,000ft2, and it’s flexible enough to accommodate different oil and gas needs.

‘They’re all flexible so that you can run any activity in them,’ says Andy Flowers, senior technical manager of real time operations and commercial IT for Halliburton.

Four secure real-time operations rooms are equipped with technologies from HP, Intel, Network Appliance and Cyviz and designed by Landmark’s Optimized Computing Solutions & Services team; three can accommodate three to four staff members while the fourth is larger. The 16 workstations in the 24x7 operations area of the center support drilling, pumping, vessel activity, and logging and perforating.

The center includes two 3D rooms. Those rooms lend themselves to serving as seismic labs as well as collaborative subsurface workflow for reservoir modeling integrated with wellplanning design, Flowers says. Other uses, such as optimizing deepwater, HTHP well operations are equally suited for those portions of the center, he says. The EBC room serves as an executive conference area for customer hosting and is equipped to handle overflow from the EORTC rooms as required.

The inaugural job at the center, Flowers says, was geosteering offshore Brazil.

Yet the technology alone is not enough to respond to client needs, Erenli says. ‘We have the cutting edge technology, but just the technology is not what the customers are looking for. They’re looking for solutions.’

Bernard says those solutions address a main topic of concern: ‘Where the next trillion barrels of oil is going to come from.’

Those solutions tend to center around certain challenges, he says: reserves are harder to access and find, the sizes of finds that are reported are decreasing, producing the heavier oil that is being found is more difficult, costs for producing are increasing, and there are fewer people to handle the tasks.

Erenli says customers need technology to deal with the challenges of drilling complex and deepwater wells, looking for unconventional reserves, working in remote environments and drilling precisely placed wells.

‘Our well targets now are basically the size of a hula hoop,’ she says.

The service company defines the Digital Asset as a ‘real-time collaborative environment to model, measure, and optimize the asset,’ Erenli says, adding that real time centers are one of the ways that Halliburton enables the Digital Asset for its clients.

‘The oil and gas companies are facing conflicting business constraints and increasing technical challenges, which they have to overcome with a shrinking pool of experienced personnel.

The Digital Asset environment is the only way to achieve that. You can’t do it by working in individual silos,’ Bernard says. The Digital Asset environment allows people, technologies, and processes to promote efficient decision making, Erenli says. Halliburton structured the Digital Asset environment to combine digital connectivity, enabling technologies, integrated workflows and the solutions to business issues that culminate from the first three, she says.

‘It turns silos into synchronized teamwork,’ Erenli continues. ‘Any qualified person can access any data, any technology, any asset, anywhere, any time.’

The DecisionSpace environment is the platform that provides a framework for multidisciplinary application and data integration, accelerates workflows, and breaks down the silos to improve asset performance.

Bernard says the Digital Asset environment is geared toward collaboration.

‘Our goal is to ensure that any qualified person has access to any data, any asset, any technology, anywhere, any time. Wherever they are, whether they’re in the customer’s office, whether they’re in the service supplier’s office, whether they’re in a third party. It doesn’t matter. They will have access to that data,’ he says. ‘It’s not just software. It’s not just data management. It’s all the resources you need to tie together to leverage the collective brainpower of all of the people that exist in our clients’ companies, in our company, and third party companies, leveraging everyone.’

Bernard says the Digital Asset environment is not just for new development, especially as oil companies drive for higher reserves recovery.

‘Nothing happens just through osmosis. You have to carefully plan how you want to develop every field and every asset you have,’ he says. ‘We believe any customer who does not use real time in their drilling activities is wasting their money.’ OE

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