A new cloud environment could be the answer to next-generation interpretation.
For all its operational innovation and wildcatter reputation, the oil and gas industry lags other sectors when it comes to cloud adoption. Of the $60 billion spent annually on cloud services, only 5% of that comes from the upstream energy business.
Necessity has stepped up the pace of adoption, however. In the belt-tightening years since the 2014 oil price collapse, energy companies have focused on harnessing the power of the cloud and artificial intelligence to shorten the time to discovery and optimize asset productivity.
Wrestling with petabytes of seismic data
The subsurface industry has experienced a longstanding challenge to efficiently access secure, reliable, seismic and well data on a global scale.
Historically, oil and gas companies consume most of the world’s high-performance computing (HPC) for processing seismic data to deliver an image of the subsurface. Still, the demand for HPC peaks only a few times a year. Cloud solutions can give these organizations the ability to scale up and down based purely on demand, so they can pay only for what they need and use. Organizations without a digital solution for their subsurface data must purchase the necessary disk space for the high volume of seismic data they use only occasionally. Most of the disk space that is not used becomes obsolete. On the other hand, cloud solutions can ramp up or ramp down data storage at a moment’s notice.
For major oil and gas companies, the question is no longer whether to use contemporary cloud technology, it’s how to overcome inherent limitations in existing seismic data formats and streamline cloud implementation.
Click here to read the full article published by Hart Energy.