Page 8: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Mar/Apr 2019)

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LEADING OFF Arti? cial Intelligence

GOOGLE TRANSLATE

FOR OIL WELLS

BY ELAINE MASLIN startup is looking to harness the world of arti? cial “They can hear everything, including ? uid ? ow inside or intelligence to help oil companies do more with the outside the well bore, ? uid ? owing through the formation, for data, as well as the oil, they get from their wells. example,” says Graham Gaston, CEO of Sensalytx, a start-up

A Big data is often billed as having the potential company creating tools for the industry to help them with ? ber to offer the oil and gas industry huge bene? ts in improved ef- optic data interpretation. The sounds detected can show where ? ciency and production, helping operators to understand more water is coming into the well, so operators can shut off that about their reservoirs, wells and process equipment. zone, or where solids, such as sand, are blocking the path into

But, a lot of the time the problem isn’t access to data, it’s the well. They can also be used to assess the condition of the what’s done with it. All too often, large amounts of the data well, so operators can optimize plugging and abandonment produced are simply not used. Fiber optic cables, for example, operations. are now being used in the industry, including for distributed “The potential is huge. There’s currently only 5,000 kilo- acoustic sensing (DAS) and distributed temperature sensing meters of ? ber installed in the industry to date and it produces (DTS), inside and along well bores. They’re capable of detect- an estimated 1.2 petabytes of data a year,” says Gaston, who ing vast amounts of temperature and sound data, from which recently completed the Aberdeen-based Oil & Gas Technol- a lot of information could be derived about the conditions in ogy Center’s TechX technology accelerator program. Many the well. millions more kilometers of the cables could be installed glob-

Distributed acoustic sensing data recorded over four minutes. Loud sound is yellow and red and blue are quiet.

Source: Sensalytx 8 OFFSHORE ENGINEER OEDIGITAL.COM 1-17 OE 2019.indd 8 4/15/2019 12:39:19 PM