New Seeq WITSML Connector Enables Insights from Drilling, Completions, and Intervention Data

How Seeq’s Connector Expansion Will Benefit the Oil and Gas Industry

Many upstream, midstream and downstream oil and gas customers use Seeq to gain faster insights, improve outcomes, and cut costs by enabling engineers to rapidly search, cleanse, investigate, and monitor the time-series data generated by their plants and assets.

Among upstream customers, there have been requests to expand their use of Seeq by connecting Seeq to their Energistics® WITSML^™ datastores. This would allow them to analyse data from current and past drilling, completions, and well intervention campaigns; for example, to perform root cause analysis on equipment failure and optimize performance. Seeq is now releasing a WITSML connector to help these customers find insights in the untapped data in their WITSML systems.

Given the current oil and gas industry challenges, this will address the need for analytics innovation to unlock the value in drilling, completions, and intervention data. WITSML data is often languishing in data silos and storage systems is now accessible to insights.

What is WITSML?

The WITSML data exchange standard is an industry initiative to provide open, non-proprietary standard interfaces for data transmission from rig sites to the offices of operators, oilfield service companies, and integrators. It is also used to share information among partners, vendors, and government agencies.

WITSML enables “the right time seamless flow of wellsite data between operators and service companies to speed decision-making.” Data streams are encapsulated in XML with transmission over HTTP/S, making WITSML robust and transportable, and leading to its widespread adoption.

The current WITSML support from Seeq is for WITSML v1.4.1.1 and WITSML v2.0 time-based logs.  Energistics Transfer Protocol (ETP), a WebSocket-based protocol to replace SOAP, is also supported.  Although ETP was designed for WITSML v2.0, many companies have adopted a middle standard of WITSML v1.4.1.1 over ETP, so support for this combination is available in addition to conventional SOAP communications.  This enables Seeq to connect to the systems customers are using for WITSML storage, such as WellLink or PetroVault.

The opportunity for operators is to extend the value initially gained from WITSML initiatives to create, aggregate, and visualize well data by overcoming lack of time and tools for engineers to complete more advanced investigation efforts, such as data cleansing, contextualizing, and monitoring to enable additional insights.

Seeq WITSML Connector

Seeq’s WITSML connector enables engineers to access drilling, completions, and intervention data stored on corporate WITSML servers, and to then gain insights using self-service analytics features such as:

Search

Google-like search enables user to find data using keywords, descriptions, and wildcards.

Cleanse

Common oilfield data quality issues can be quickly and easily rectified using Seeq’s Formula tool. For example, miscalibrated sensor readings can be adjusted and time-shifted, with units of measure corrected, on the fly. And data cleansing algorithms can be easily applied to smooth signals or remove outliers.

Quantify

Statistics for signals and conditions, e.g. from product flow signals, may be calculated to find the total amount of product produced each day and the value of the total product.

Monitor

Deviations outside set operating thresholds can be easily detected and presented using multiple metrics, operating conditions, and excursions.

Model & Predict

Predictions based on forecasted input data can be built to anticipate future events.

Document & Publish

Engineers, operators, management, and other employees can assemble and view analytics in reports, dashboards, shift handover reports, and more.

Seeq is a productive, self-service application for engineers of all disciplines. With the release of the new WITSML connector, drilling, completions, and well intervention engineers can now use intuitive point-and-click data analytics tools to tackle operational challenges. Using Seeq enables engineers to:

• Improve – Build analyses and KPIs and scale out analyses to compare metrics for multiple assets/wells to ascertain non-productive time, lost time, insights by shift, and other information.
• Optimize – ROP and drilling connection time, cased-hole tripping speed, tripping connection time
• Investigate – Well ballooning and kick events, high frequency oscillations, stick/slip, stuck pipe

With Seeq’s new WITSML connector, upstream oil and gas companies have an opportunity to tap into innovation in analytics software to improve their production and business outcomes on well site information sets. The result will be fast, data-based decision-making for employees.

WITSML is a trademark of Energistics Consortium, Inc.

About the Author

Paul Milne started his career in the oil patch in 2001 by installing and supporting a drilling data reporting system on a rig offshore West Africa for six weeks over Christmas and New Year’s. Since then, he’s travelled the world from the North Sea to the fringes of the Sahara desert, working on various projects in the oil and gas industry. Paul enjoys working with engineers of all disciplines and backgrounds to get the job done.