The New Edge. Building and Deploying a New State of the Art, High Speed Acquisition, Automation and Analytics Platform for Drilling, Completions, Production, and Renewable Energy Applications

This paper discusses the architecture, development, and deployment of a new state-of-the-art data acquisition and analytics platform. The system is designed to capture and store data for all phases of well construction and is also suited to aggregating data from renewable energy sources such as offshore wind turbines. In today's well construction world it is vitally important that an edge platform can capture high-quality, high-speed data. It needs to be able to universally translate data from many protocols and provide outbound data streams that are easy to consume and store. The high-quality data streams can then be queried by high-value analytics that ultimately deliver predictive and prescriptive solutions. Our approach was to identify the market pain and develop a system that solved the digital requirements for our customers who needed a field-deployed and field-supported, agnostic digital ecosystem. In the new "Digital Oilfield" the requirements for data capture, aggregation, edge computing, automation, cloud infrastructure and office applications are all expanding rapidly. Most "Edge" solutions are cloud-based and come from purely digital companies who have little or no domain knowledge or field infrastructure with which to deploy and maintain those systems. It was observed that an "Edge" solution was required that remained highly performant even if network connectivity from the cloud to the location was lost. This paper will also discuss the novel approach to the development of this platform with an oil & gas operator's subject matter experts being embedded in the contractor's product development team. The result being an end-to-end solution designed for both the requirements of the field and the office. The customer had previously built its own system internally, but was looking for a partner who could update and maintain an evergreen technology stack, increase speed and capability and be able to maintain and support a scalable product worldwide on all its operational locations. We will explain the development process, early field testing and commercialization of this product and the results that were achieved. This new system will have an open architecture that allows other digital companies to leverage the high-speed data and host their applications on the platform both on the wellsite and in the office. The system also provides interoperability with the machines on location, this interoperability enables a wide range of 3rd parties to be able to deliver automated applications on the well location. This technology will enable significant performance improvements in drilling and completion operations.