Convincing petroleum companies to use cloud services is big dream from all the technology companies including, Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. I myself was also part of a similar exercise in collaboration with one of these company, however that was a failed effort. There are many lesson learned from that activity and the main bottleneck is just removed by google in this smart move.
My colleague gave me the JPT, September edition due to a eye catching title of my interest that is “Putting Blockchain on Drilling Rigs”. I may talk about this particular topic later, as the topic for this post is another article within same edition i.e.
“Google offers Insight into industry data possibilities”
Being a google customer of more than 20 products and a data management professional with R&D background, this topic was more interesting to read. Here are my views along with the summary of this article.
We know that big data, AI, machine learning and many other interlinked technologies has impacted various industries and Oil and Gas is not an exception. The top executives from a great consortium including, Google, Shell, Encana and Schlumberger are going to talked about the digital transformation in SPE ATC.
The talk covering the workforce up-gradation to embrace new technologies and workflows. To achieve this objective successfully, you need people in decision making positions, having expertise on both domain and that is what Google just did. They hired a seasoned geologist (Darryl Willis) as a VP Google Cloud’s oil and gas unit. I wish they hire a geophysicist also, as they have more mathematical background and bigger challenges in term of size of data they handle.
Mostly cloud technologies is focusing more on automatic processing and interpretation and/or assisting the interpreters to perform smarter.
Oil and gas companies are still reluctant to upload data to public cloud and therefore the cloud adoption rate would still be challenging, even if companies offer smarter technologies to solve the long-standing problems at low price.
We also have the private cloud, however that platform misses the power of collective knowledge, which makes it powerless. Therefore, we need to device a mechanism to deploy a private cloud to oil companies and in the same time also provide a mechanism to share/merge the trained models from one organization (similar to ONNX) to another using some OPEN format. This will provide the IT departments a visibility, confidence and control to understand that, the content being going out or coming in, is not breaching the organization’s data privacy standards.
