Personal Computing In The Oil Patch
Authors: Ratterman Joseph  W. , Greenhorn R.C. 
Published: March 2010

Personal computers, more aptly called microcomputers in the business environment, are rapidly gaining acceptance throughout the oil and gas industry. The personal computer has been lifted out of the home and into the office to such a great extent that the personal computer's share of the market should exceed those for either mainframe or minicomputers by 1985. This is a remarkable achievement, considering that the first personal computer only came on the market in the late seventies.

The personal computer is ideally suited to support the rigors of the energy industry. They first met commercial success by providing self-contained, independent computing resources dedicated to a single user. Functioning in this manner, it becomes a powerful tool.

Today the user has many more options that just a stand-alone device (Fig. 1). The personal computer can be connected to a larger minicomputer or mainframe and used as a terminal. One can communicate with outside service bureaus to access private data bases and obtain proprietary or public information. They can also be connected together to form "local area networks" whereby two or more microcomputers are linked and share common information and support devices (e.g. data bases, printers, graphic plotters storagedevices, etc).

Several factors have fuelled the success and acceptance of personal computers:They are relatively small and inexpensive.They can operate just about anywhereconventional low voltage electricity is available.They require no special environmental conditioning and are amazingly powerful devices.They may be operated with ease by non-professional data processors.Their response time is extremely fast usually less than one second, (response time is the time required by a computer to accept a request, process the request and return an answer to terminal), thus providing a very productive environment.

Use of Personal Computers

As a stand-alone processor, it can serve as a valuable tool to help engineers, managers and accountants perform their jobs. Software is now available to support the engineer in the calculation of oil and gas reserves, to determine their value, graphically portray production decline curves, estimate the productive life of oil and gas wells, analyze water-flood performance and perform a host of well test programs and simulations. For the accountant and financial executive, software is now available to support oil and gas accounting systems that, until recently, were only available on much larger and more expensive units. Property reporting, joint interest billing, revenue distribution, production accounting, AFE control and general accounting and responsibility reporting systems can all be processed on personal computers.

The options available to the personal computer user increase as the system's complexity and sophistication grows. When it is linked to a larger computer, it can emulate a terminal and operate as an extension of the larger unit. Personal computers can be used as distributed processors -information can be down-loaded from a mainframe computer or data supplier (such as well production data from several external service bureaus) to the personal computer and then manipulated by he user.