The New Age of Subsurface Data and Application Management with OSDU
Authors: Rehman Atiq Ur , Fogat Mrigya 
Published: February 2025

Exploration and production operations have drastically changed demanding better scientific algorithms, workflows and equations that help make better decisions mitigating the risk factor and enabling successful exploration ventures after "easy hydrocarbon exploration" era came to end. This requires decision making backed by mammoth amounts of data from various data sources to be utilized in compute heavy and scientifically advanced applications. This has led to a new era of data management that breaks barriers of data silos, is standardized and technology agnostic enabling fluidity, collaboration and cost effectiveness with highly agile governance. This paper demonstrates the transformation of a large E&P operator to the Open Subsurface Data universe backed by Halliburton’s development on industry’s first hybrid cloud designed to deploy, integrate, and manage sophisticated E&P cloud applications to the OSDU™ data platform to provide interoperability between applications to enhance the new innovations and development.

The approach to this Operator’s transformation was based on Halliburton-Landmark’s end-to-end workflow and seamless dataflow and application integration across the domain on OSDU™ unified data platform testing and establishing workflows in all key compute heavy stages and E&P-Seismic processing, interpretation, well planning, well construction and advanced AI/ML algorithms.

The OSDU™ Data platform is hosted on the operator’s cloud instance which needs to be connected to all vendor agnostic applications. Halliburton deployed an iEnergy cloud instance and set up an open architecture platform as an in-formation foundation that connects to the Operator’s OSDU™ data platform through OSDU™ API calls creating a virtual data lake without data replication. This open architecture platform connects the operator’s data to all applications hosted on the cloud and even enabling data transfer between the applications for increased collaboration. Various E&P workflows from subsurface data processing to drilling workflows were tested and performance, connectivity and cost optimization was measured.

This transformation in data management enabled running big data processing jobs and generate multiple scenarios to help create accurate, integrated, and reliable subsurface models and make better decisions.

This transformation in data management, OSDU™ standard adoption and cloud migration lead to:

Building more models in less time with unmatched speed, drastically reducing the typical earth modeling workflow time Handle large quantities of data by leveraging elastic cloud computing to quickly calculate and quantify accurate, reliable oil and gas reserves Access one integrated, up-to-date model to use and collaborate with other disciplines across the enterprise, improving workforce efficiency and effectiveness. Make better well placement decisions and production forecasting with the aid of more trusted reserves calculations.

The success of this deployment serves as a model to unlocking the benefits of standardized data management and adoption of cloud. This study also sheds light on not just how operators should envision their journey to OSDU™ but also how E&P service providers can transform their solutions (applications, services, management) to be OSDU™ compliant. Halliburton has been an active and contributing member of the OSDU™ Community ensuring the applications in their portfolio are OSDU™ compatible including a breadth of cloud-native applications, intelligent AI/ML based applications, and workflows for data scientists to build new models run on top of OSDU™.

The success of OSDU™ depends on identifying the right data strategy and highlighting the right workflow that will have an impact on the business. This paper demonstrates the planning, execution and results of the same. In addition, this paper addresses governance and security.