The Hitchhikers

Guide to the
Subsurface Universe
Navigating the Digital Future
of the E&P Industry
 The upstream oil and gas industry is undergoing a radical transformation. New
technologies and new digital solutions are coming together to trigger a new
industrial revolution, connecting physical assets to the Internet, providing new
insights into operations through advanced analytics, and enabling new and more
efficient forms of cross-domain collaboration. The complex will be simplified, and
the physical will become digital.

Technology is helping organizations across industries to transition from an analog

past to a digital future. It is no different for the E&P industry. New technology
promise to cut costs, improve efficiencies, and streamline operations for E&P
companies.

This is the theme of this eBook, a short guide to the digital subsurface universe
and the digital transformation of the E&P industry. With the increasing need
to rely on digital technologies to improve operations, E&P companies need to
understand and develop appropriate strategies based on the future technology
landscape.

With this eBook, we aim to do three things. First, to give you an overview of
the technologies and trends that drive the digital transformation of the E&P
industry. Second, to dive deeper into the various cloud-based platforms that can
provide tangible business impact for E&P companies. Lastly, to highlight a critical
challenge that emerges with the proliferation of cloud-based platforms in the
E&P industry and provide you with concrete advice on how you can solve that
challenge.

2 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe Cegal

 Content
1. The Digital Transformation of the Subsurface Universe:
4 Technologies and Trends

2. Platform Play: An Overview of Subsurface Universe

8 Digital Platforms

12 3. Busting Cloud Silos with Vendor-Agnostic Cloud Integration

3 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe Cegal

 1. The Digital Transformation
of the Subsurface Universe:
Technologies and Trends
The oil and gas industry generally
and the E&P sector specifically is
increasingly adopting and leveraging
new technology to improve, optimize,
and innovative the performance
of their systems. According to an
Accenture and Microsoft survey on
digital trends in upstream oil and gas,
over 70 percent plan to invest more in
digital technologies over the coming
years.1
The uptake of digital transformation
in the E&P sector is driving rapid
change and promise to maximize
efficiencies, deliver significant
operational improvements, and
provide cost savings opportunities.
Several technologies and trends
are underpinning this radical
transformation. In this chapter,
we will explore some of the most
important ones.
1
Accenture: “Drill Deeper Into Digital: Accenture and Microsoft 2017 Upstream Oil and Gas Digital Trends Survey”
2
Gartner: “Gartner IT Glossary: Digitalization”
3
McKinsey: “The Next Frontier for Digital Technologies in Oil and Gas”
4 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
Digitalization
The primary aim of digital technology
adoption is, or at least should be, to
transform legacy business models,
create new revenue streams, and
transition from an analog business
to a digital one. This is digitalization
in a nutshell. According to Gartner,
digitalization is the use of digital
technologies to change business
models and generate new revenue
and value-producing opportunities.2
For the E&P sector specifically, digital
technologies promise to drive faster
and better decision-making and
shorter time-to-oil and gas. Research
from consultancy firm McKinsey
reveals that the oil and gas industry
can leverage digital technologies to
reduce capital expenditures by up to
20 percent and cut operating costs in
upstream by 3 to 5 percent.3
Cegal
 Cloud Computing: Public
Cloud and Software-as-a-
Service (SaaS)
Few trends in the IT world has had
a more significant impact than the
emergence of cloud computing.
Although the technology for many
has been an almost unnoticeable
transition from local computing to
the delivery of computing service
over the Internet, cloud computing
is fundamental to increase the
effectiveness and benefits of
digital transformation. It promises
significant time, cost, and flexibility
advantages and represents a major
shift in how organizations think about
their IT resources – including E&P
companies.
One global oil and gas company is
currently transferring their workloads
to a cloud solution, expecting to
optimize costs by close to 40 percent.
Another European natural gas
operator has significantly increased
its environment availability – from 54
percent to 90 percent – through cloud
computing.4
Cloud computing takes on various
forms, depending on its architecture
and deployment model. Public clouds,
which are owned and operated by
a third-party cloud service provider,
and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS),
which delivers on-demand software
applications over the Internet, are
4
Accenture: “Exploring the Cloud in the Oil & Gas Industry”
5
Microsoft: “Top Oil & Gas Firm Accelerates Software Development to Fuel Global Energy production”
5 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
becoming increasingly popular with
E&P companies.
Agile Teams and DevOps
A new generation of digital
companies has set new standards
for speed, efficiency, and resilience
by rethinking how we collaborate,
innovate, and develop new services
and products. Discarding legacy
organizational structures and
outdated modes of collaboration,
these companies instead work in
multi-disciplinary and agile teams
and use what has commonly been
known as DevOps capabilities.
Multi-disciplinary teams, agile teams,
and DevOps are increasingly gaining
a foothold within the oil and gas
industry, as well. The multinational oil
and gas company Shell, for instance,
has implemented an agile DevOps
approach to development. They have
leveraged the power of the cloud
to create a more streamlined and
centralized solution for application
development, enabling geophysicists,
software engineers, QA specialists,
and external vendors to collaborate
on the same project from any
location. Shell’s developers are now
better equipped to create a new
generation of technology solutions,
whether it is reservoir modeling
simulations or innovative mobile apps
for consumers.5
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 Globalization
The increasing adoption of digital
technologies and digital platforms
worldwide is making the world
both smaller and more connected.
Services and data flow between
regions and locations, and the global
economy becomes increasingly more
interconnected.
Globalization has an impact on
the E&P sector too. Most notably,
more and more new reserves are
discovered in locations far from
traditional reserves, making the oil
and gas industry more globalized
in their exploration efforts.
Consequently, E&P companies
increasingly need to establish IT
infrastructure that can encompass
large parts of the world, ensure the
integration of remote teams, and
allow information to flow freely
between different locations and time-
zones.
6 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
Next-Gen Applications
The emergence of new technologies
and novel collaboration models are
changing how applications are built.
The volumes of data are increasing
in size, the need for real-time
processing of data is growing, and
IT infrastructures are transforming.
These changes are pushing software
application providers towards a
new generation of applications
that leverage the profound shifts in
computing technologies.
Next-gen applications can collect and
process data from a wide variety of
data sources, from sensor technology
installed on oil rigs to legacy
applications to cloud solutions. These
applications rely on and communicate
with data stored in the public cloud
through so-called microservices
and Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs). Microservices are
small services that run in their own
processes and are independently
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 deployable, as opposed to working
with one centralized system. APIs,
on the other hand, enables different
systems to communicate and
exchange data with each other.
Together, microservices and APIs
enable the creation of next-gen
applications that can be utilized for
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine
Learning (ML) capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
Machine Learning (ML)
AI and ML is perhaps the biggest
revolution in man-machine
collaboration we have witnessed
so far. AI refers to the science and
engineering of making intelligent
machines and computer programs,
machines, and programs that can
perform cognitive functions we
associate with the human mind. ML, a
subset of AI, refers to technology and
algorithms that can detect patterns
and learn how to make predictions
and recommendations on processed
data.
Pushing to cut operating costs, oil
and gas companies are increasingly
looking to and investing in AI and ML
technologies. These technologies
can help automate functions, predict
equipment problems, and increase
the value from data.
6
EY: “Does AI Have the Power to Refine Oil and Gas Efficiency?”
7
BP: “BP Invests in New Artificial Intelligence Technology”
7 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
According to a survey by consultancy
firm EY, more than half of the
surveyed respondents are currently
implementing AI applications,
investing close to $65 billion a year
in R&D as a whole.6 The British
multinational oil and gas company
BP, for example, has invested $5
million in new AI technology to unlock
critical data for their subsurface
engineers at an accelerated pace.
Their AI-based platform “Sandy” aims
to accelerate project lifecycles, from
exploration to reservoir modeling, and
targets a 90 percent time reduction
in data collection, interpretation, and
simulation.7
“Power to the Business”
As technology and digital solutions
become increasingly critical for oil
and gas companies, IT will no longer
be a support function but become
integral to business success. As a
consequence, the business side of
E&P companies will rely less on the
IT department for investments in IT
solutions and have more decision-
making power on what solutions to
invest in.
This shift means that E&P
companies are increasingly relying
on vendors with substantial domain
knowledge about the challenges
and opportunities inherent in the
digitalization of the industry.
Cegal
 2. Platform Play: An
Overview of Subsurface
Universe Digital Platforms

Upstream oil and gas and E&P
companies have, for a long time,
relied on legacy technology and
infrastructure, making it challenging
to analyze and interpret large
volumes of data and workflows
quickly.
Traditionally, IT systems in E&P
companies have been built to provide
solutions for individual functions
across the value chain. They are
often based on legacy software
applications that are bought from
different vendors and are unable
to communicate well with each
other, creating an inflexible system
architecture and making it difficult to
access underlying data.
Today, many of the trends and
technologies presented in the
previous chapter have converged to
enable the creation of centralized
platforms. A new breed of cloud-
based platform providers has
emerged in the upstream oil and
gas industry to help E&P companies
liberate data trapped in disparate
information silos. In this chapter,
we will explore some of the most
prominent.
Delfi Cognitive E&P
Environment
A mark of Schlumberger, the Delfi
Cognitive E&P Environment is a
cloud-based space that enables
collaboration by connecting people,
data, and software applications
related to exploration, development,
drilling, production, and midstream.
The platform makes applications
and workflows accessible to users

8 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe Cegal

 and allows team members to build
common workspaces for data,
models, and data interpretations.
The Delfi Cognitive E&P Environment
makes it easy to move data to
the cloud, facilitates next-gen
applications, and eliminates the need
for high-performance equipment
on-premise. The platform includes
several tools and solutions that cater
to various needs:
DrillPlan is a digital planning
solution for well construction. It
provides team members access to
all the information, data, and science
they need in a single, common
system. Designed for the cloud and
accessible in the DELFI Cognitive E&P
Environment, DrillPlan aims to speed
up and enhance the quality of drilling
programs through automation and
validation of workflows.
DrillOps leverages new levels
of instrumentation, automation,
and cognition to ensure peak
performance operations of oil rigs and
increased drilling efficiency and well
productivity.
Drilling Interpretation provides
real-time drilling monitoring and
analysis workflows. The solution
promotes team collaboration
through a multiuser, cross-domain
environment, provides performance
and risk mitigation improvements,
8
Schlumberger Software: “Delfi Cognitive E&P Environment”
9 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
enables cost-saving decisions, and
the ability to benchmark operational
performance through drilling
performance analysis.
Petrotechnical Suite provides users
with access to market-leading
technologies and leverage new
petrotechnical tools, functionalities,
and capabilities in the cloud.8
iEnergy Cloud
The iEnergy Cloud is a Halliburton
and Landmark-operated platform
that offers E&P tools and resources
in the cloud. The solution is part
of Landmark’s iEnergy, an E&P
community in the cloud where
independent software developers
can showcase their technology
components portfolio. The iEnergy
Cloud includes Landmark’s
DecisionSpace 365, a suite of digital,
E&P SaaS applications on the public
cloud, which provides end-users with
access to third-party applications
from multiple vendors.
Landmark’s platform is particularly
suitable for E&P companies that want
to leverage centralized solutions and
reduce the need for investments in
on-premise hardware. Landmark
also provides end-users with
access to the cloud on their private
network through Landmark Earth,
an architecture that comes complete
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 with engineered, pre-optimized
and pre-configured hardware,
and integrated, pre-installed E&P
software. The solution includes E&P
engineered appliance, specifically
configured and optimized to run high-
demand E&P software.9 10
Cognite Data Fusion
Heavy-asset industries such as oil
and gas have access to vast amounts
of data but need software to collect,
clean, and contextualize the data.
This is where the software company
Cognite comes in. Founded in 2016,
Cognite aims to meet the demands
of industrial digitalization through
data liberation. Their platform
Cognite Data Fusion functions as a
resource to transform industrial data
into information and to create an
ecosystem of industrial applications.
Cognite Data Fusion is particularly
suitable for centralizing production
data and enables E&P companies
to leverage AI and ML capabilities
through next-gen applications.
Cognite Data Fusion retrieves and
liberates data from disparate silos
and makes it available in the cloud.
For deeper insight and improved
analytics capabilities, the solution
adds layers of context to the available
data. Data retrieved from sensor
9
Landmark Solutions: “iEnergy Continues to Expand Its Community of Niche Software Providers”
10
iEnergy Community: “Your Journey to the Cloud”
11
Cognite: “Cognite Data Fusion”
12
Bluware: “Bluware Seismic Technology Platform”
10 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
technology can be viewed in relation
to equipment hierarchies, P&IDs,
3D models, maintenance logs,
and weather data. Furthermore,
Cognite Data Fusion allows you to
create proprietary applications on
the contextualized data through
application programming interfaces
(APIs).11
Bluware
Bluware is an oil and gas software
company that helps E&P companies
solve their most challenging
petrotechnical objectives. Working
closely with the E&P sector to
drive business innovation, Bluware
leverages cloud computing, AI, and
ML for geophysical data, applications,
and workflows and aims to accelerate
digital transformation initiatives in
the oil and gas industry.
Specifically, the Bluware platform
was invented to eliminate bottlenecks
in geophysical workflows and the
consumption of geophysical data
that reduce the ability to make
timely and informed decisions. Their
solution enables end-users to quickly
move data in and out of the cloud by
transforming legacy application files
into objects that are ready to be used
in the cloud.12 The solution makes it
possible to move data to the public
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 cloud, enables next-gen applications
on seismic data, and the possibility to
leverage AI and ML.
OSDU
The Open Group Open Subsurface
Data Universe (OSDU) is a
conglomerate of leading oil and
gas companies coming together to
discuss how cloud technology can
be used to transform the complex
data and application environment in
the industry. Aiming to break down
silos and put data at the center of the
subsurface community, the OSDU is
developing a standard data platform
for the oil and gas industry.
The OSDU solution standardizes all
the available data from production
13
OSDU: “Putting Data at the Center: All Subsurface and Wells Data Stored in a Single Data Platform”
11 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
companies to enable independent
software vendors to build software
and create next-gen applications. It
is based on a common data platform
with standard public APIs and
involves global cloud hosting vendors
to build working implementations.
This enables the platform to separate
data from applications and companies
to focus on differentiating parts of
their business activities and reduce
the need for independently designing
and validating a subsurface data
platform.13
Related to the OSDU is the OpenEarth
Community, a community for oil and
gas companies working together to
speed up and lower the cost of digital
innovation within the industry.
Cegal

with Vendor-Agnostic
Cloud Integration
Cloud-based platforms are rapidly
becoming a mainstay for IT
infrastructure management in oil and
gas. However, as more and more E&P
companies turn to digital platforms to
harness their opportunities, another
problem emerges – the proliferation
of cloud silos.
Data Platforms Create Cloud
Silos
Cloud computing and E&P data
platforms are great assets. They
provide users with a wealth of
applications for various work
processes, enables increased
productivity and innovation, and
provides easy access to data and
information from mobile devices. But
E&P companies often have to rely on
12 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
3. Busting Cloud Silos
several different data platforms from
different vendors to tackle specific
tasks. The problem arises when these
platforms are unable to communicate
or challenging to integrate.
The increasing use of data platforms
that are unable to connect with
each other creates information
silos. Data and information silos are
nothing new. In traditional enterprise
systems, information silos emerged
when processes and data existed on
separate servers or data centers and
where unable to interact with each
other. Cloud silos function in the same
way. However, instead of on-premise
silos, the walls and barriers between
data, information, and processes find
themselves in the cloud.
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 Busting Silos with Cloud
Integration
Cloud silos, like any other information
silo, hamper growth and efficiency
and may lead to duplication of work
efforts, lack of synergy, and missed
business opportunities. In other
words, they should be torn down.
Fortunately, the cloud can help itself
tear down cloud-based information
silos.
The cloud may create the problem,
but it also provides the solution. Due
to the complexities of integrating
various cloud solutions and data
platforms, a new breed of service
providers has emerged that
helps organizations negotiate the
complexities of cloud migrations.
These so-called cloud integrators
enable organizations to bring
together the data and information of
all your different applications, tools,
and platforms through specialized
cloud-based solutions.
13 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe
GeoCloud: The Vendor-
Agnostic Cloud Integrator
Cegal is one such cloud integrator,
specializing in the unique challenges
of the E&P industry. Our solution
GeoCloud is the only vendor-agnostic
petrotechnical cloud solution, a
high-performance platform tailored
to meet the challenging requirements
for petrotechnical workloads. The
solution is not tied to the applications
of a specific vendor or solution and
facilitates E&P applications and data
in a collaborative and flexible solution.
GeoCloud facilitates a scalable
workspace for the future, integrates
with any vendor, and is adaptable
to any end-user requirement. The
platform enables true cross-border
collaboration and global access to
data and applications and provides
a digitalization hub for data and
application consolidation and
workflow automation.
Cegal
 For more information regarding GeoCloud
and Cegal, please visit:

www.cegal.com

14 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Subsurface Universe Cegal

Unless otherwise mentioned, all photos are owned and copyrighted by Cegal