Oil & Gas Industry to Energise itself with Advanced Analytics-powered Growth

Traditional operations of the oil & gas industry are undergoing a digital transformation with the advent of advanced analytics and data science technologies. Leading oil & gas companies are heavily relying on advanced analytics and business intelligence to get ahead of the curve, amidst the rising pressures due to stressful socioeconomic conditions. By leveraging the power of advanced analytics, leaders in the oil & gas industry are aiming to bid a tide to operational challenges that are triggered by the tough environment that has caused a sharp rise in production costs.

The oil & gas industry is the space that mainly operates with the inventions and discoveries, dominated by scientists and engineers. A large number of oil & gas operations are heavily directed by enormous amounts of data, facts, and figures that must be taken into consideration while making data-driven and informed decisions.

However, most of the players in the oil & gas space fail to efficiently deal with the data that comes in through various sources, in order to use it in a way that helps boost business outcomes. In both, upstream and downstream sectors, data integration is becoming a big barrier for companies creating other challenges such as unstructured or silo-ed data, which inhibit various end-to-end business operations.

With the advent of next-generation technologies such as Big Data and advanced data analytics, various business intelligence and data visualization tools can help oil & gas companies visualize the value and designing to attain better data integration. Especially with the intensifying competition in the industry, oil & gas companies can drastically improve their workflow and performance with the help of advanced analytics.

Thereby, adopting next-generation tools integrated with Artificial Intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, and business intelligence technologies can enable oil & gas companies to devise new strategies for tangible gains.

Despite its tremendous potential for growth and expansion across the world, the oil & gas industry is still struggling to cross the data-related barriers that inhibit companies from making profits. This is among the most prominent reasons why leading oil & gas companies are showing inclination towards advanced analytics to improve the operational workflow and performance, ultimately to tap into new avenues of growth amidst such difficult times.

Here are the five key areas where oil & gas companies must implement advanced analytics to see a sea change in their performance, by powering their productivity and profits through accurate business and operational insights.

The current surveillance and reservoir management practices followed by most oil & gas companies result in cutting the recovery of assets by half than what is expected in ideal scenarios. As a mounting number of industry players are seeing the amount of data rise exponentially, mainly due to the omnipresence of connectivity, the existing platforms for reservoir management in the oilfield industry fail to accelerate the recovery of assets due to the complex structure of data.

This is triggering most of the players in the oil & gas industry to adopt Big Data and other advanced data analytics tools, syncing with their new approach of letting their reservoirs talk. With the help of Big Data analytics, oil & gas companies are being able to gain more awareness about the information on their reservoir capacities and weaknesses. This can, ultimately, improve the way reservoir management operations take place in the oil & gas landscape in the coming years.

One of the most challenging and economically risky processes involved in oil & gas operations is discovery and production of hydrocarbon. In order to mitigate the cost of this entire operation, which is essential for offering a low-cost energy source for societies, a mounting number of oil & gas companies are resorting to AI-powered and advanced analytics tools.

As the process of producing hydrocarbons creates enormous amounts of data, the industry is changing the approach to interpret and integrate this data through advanced analytics. They are leveraging the power of autonomous robots and drones that are integrated with advanced analytics tools to locate hydrocarbons underneath the ground, which makes oil & gas production less risky and more economic.

As the prices of oil are constantly fluctuating, it is becoming a must for oil & gas companies to find better tools for optimizing their production capacities. With adoption of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools, leading companies are aiming to simplify the complex problems associated with production optimization. Advanced analytics tools are proving powerful for these companies as they combine AI, ML, and many more data engineering techniques that do not change conventional production models, but complement them in the process of production optimization.

Currently, electrical submersible pumps (ESP) is one of the fastest growing artificial-lift pumping technology, which is being deployed in a majority of oil wells across the world. However, oil & gas companies are facing a major issue with ESP performance, which is often observed to decline gradually, ultimately leading to operational shutdowns due to various factors such as corrosion, high temperatures, and high gas volumes.

With the adoption of advanced analytics tools, leading oil & gas companies are employing multivariate statistics to diagnose and predict impending problems with the operations of ESP. Advanced analytics tools are enabling oil & gas companies to predict ESP failures in advance and aid in diagnostics of the potential cause leading to the failure, which ultimately helps them optimize their production as well.

Advanced analytics and Big Data analytics are being ubiquitous across the oil & gas industry, which is rapidly undergoing digital transformation by handling various assets through data sensors by virtue of value, volume, veracity, velocity, variety, and complexity. This is expected to energise the digital future of the oil & gas industry, empowering stakeholders to powerboost their performance despite economic slowdown and other socioeconomic hindrances.