The Future of Computing in the Petroleum Industry
Authors: Liu Dianbin 
Published: December 2007

The computer information industry is seeing a revolutionary growth with the introduction of the Internet and especially the World-Wide Web (WWW). There is no doubt that this trend will affect the petroleum industry tremendously in the near future. This paper analyzes the current tools available and tries to forecast the state-of-the-art use of these tools in this industry.

Web browsers are getting mature everyday with security features and interactive capabilities. Java (and JavaScript) provides yet another powerful object-oriented way of writing tools on the Internet. Already, more and more oil and gas companies are using these for inter-company and intra-company data transfer, advertising, and many other purposes. This paper was submitted to SPE using a Web browser.

With so many advantages, it is easy to foresee that these same companies want to use them more and more often in their daily work and life. This entails using them for log acquisition and analysis, reservoir simulation, well testing, production data analysis, reserves, and filling regulatory reports, etc. Users will also be satisfied with the openness, ease of use, common interface (low-cost training) and widely available tools (such as the numerous Java applets) that they can use to design and customize to their own taste.

This paper gives some examples of using Web browsers to do engineering calculations such as oil and gas correlations and field calculations. It is the hope of the author to inspire other colleagues in this industry to start in this direction and bring this bright future nearer.

Introduction

In the beginning, the computers were scattered all around, separated from each other. Then the Internet was created. The academians used it at first to exchange ideas among themselves through e-mail, telnet and ftp. It was seen as good, but difficult to use for the normal population or the critical mass. Then came along the Internet browsers. It was those browsers that made the Internet popular and connected those networks of internets and intranets into a World-Wide Web. The ease of use of these browsers made it a breeze to navigate (surf) the Web. Nowadays, almost every company, university, and organization has an appearance on the Web. However, it is important to note that up until today, most of these Web pages are relatively static information published and updated regularly or irregularly. With the introduction of Java Script and Java, the browsers are taking in more functions and usability for the scientific and business circles as they are more interactive. As a matter of fact, Java is threatening to take over many of the traditional programming languages such as Visual Basic and Visual C++ because of its ease of use, better portability and ever-increasing popularity.

The petroleum industry, in the author's opinion, is not too late jumping on the bandwagon with this new and developing technology. Already, many upstream E&P companies, service companies are appearing on the net. But again, most of these Web pages are also static information. The scientific computing on the Web is still in its infant stage. This paper illustrates the ease of use and the possibility of petroleum computing on the Web through some simple engineering applications. It's the author's hope that with this paper, more applications will be introduced in this industry dealing with wider variety of daily routines such as log analysis, seismic interpretation, financial analysis, reserves estimates and management, well testing, geostatistics, and reservoir simulation, etc.

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