Enhancing Data Reliability and Retrieval from the Field in Oil & Gas

Did you know that the total amount of data processed in a digital oilfield every single day can be petabyte-sized (trillions of bytes) or larger, but yet only 50% of midstream companies consider data management a priority? This is a key disconnect in the oil and gas industry, which has led to inefficiencies and lags in operations. With the overwhelming number of PLCs, RTUs, flow meters and new smart devices in the oilfield, a commitment to the digital transformation of oil and gas assets has never been more important.  

For midstream companies, it is not enough to just go digital. In order to truly derive value from their data and both legacy and new assets, oil and gas leaders must align the adoption of technology and digitalization with the core goals of their businesses. If implemented in the right places, with the right technology partner, oil and gas leaders can reduce annual downtime by 70% and bring down unplanned cost to 22% of their total average expenses, compared to 50% currently.  

Choosing the Right Partner in Data Delivery  

Whether you are implementing new systems to manage more pipeline or adding new tools for automation in the digital oilfield, AUTOSOL has 33 years of experience in bringing disparate sources of data together in ways that provide a complete view of your operations. Our comprehensive industrial communications platform breaks down data silos between proprietary devices and diverse backend systems, and enables more reliable collection of data that was previously lost or left stranded in the oilfield, thus making all mission-critical data always accessible and easily shareable.  

As a result, midstream oil and gas leaders are empowered to analyze operations holistically, make decisions rapidly and effectively, and prioritize optimization for the greatest ROI. Our advanced protocol translator was built from the ground up for the needs of the oil and gas market, and it is widely considered as the de-facto standard for data delivery in the industry today. We recently published two case studies that delve into the digital journeys of our clients, exploring AUTOSOL’s solution to commonly-faced challenges in oil and gas as told by the stories of Red Cedar Gathering Company and Flywheel Energy. 

Red Cedar Gathering Company  

Red Cedar Gathering Company is a midstream energy company focused on the gathering, treatment and compression of natural gas, with environmental protection among its top priorities. The company wanted to implement a solution to enable them to comprehensively collect well site data to comply with environmental regulations while also gaining insight into opportunities to reduce its carbon footprint. 

Needing to provide regular air quality reports to the EPA, and facing up to $40,000 in regulatory fines per occurrence of missing data, critical information loss was not a risk that Red Cedar Gathering could take. AUTOSOL deployed its eACM edge-based polling engine, loaded onto FreeWave Technologies’ ruggedized industrial edge computing platform, to provide the ability to locally store data in the event of a communications interruption. Once connectivity is restored, eACM automatically back-fills the data so no information is lost. With the implementation of eACM, AUTOSOL and Red Cedar Gathering were able to achieve the following: 

• Seamless integration with in-place infrastructure 
• Improved data gathering reliability 
• Lower costs and avoidance of EPA fines  
• Regulatory compliance 
• Enhanced ability to proactively minimize environmental impact 

Flywheel Energy  

Flywheel Energy is a private exploration and production company with large onshore U.S. oil and gas assets. The company came to AUTOSOL seeking a solution that could help them obtain a more detailed and accurate view of performance across their gas-producing shale wells. 

At one site, for example, the company was collecting values from 2,229 data tags that created an excess of unnecessary overhead messages with no insight into what was happening at its wells between polls. AUTOSOL loaded its eACM software onto FreeWave Technologies’ ZumIQ™ platform to enable edge-based polling with protocol conversion to MQTT and MQTT Sparkplug B, which use a highly efficient report-by-exception approach to data delivery. Within just one day of using eACM, Flywheel Energy was able to reduce unnecessary data transmissions consuming excessive bandwidth and use that freed capacity to acquire more accurate views of its wells. By doing so, AUTOSOL and Flywheel Energy were able to achieve the following: 

• Increased data resolution by 60-fold 
• Lowered bandwidth consumption 
• Increased the speed of plunger optimization by 14-fold 
• Drove increased production as a result 

For the full details on these success stories, download our case studies on Red Cedar Gathering Company and Flywheel Energy and discover how comprehensive industrial data communications can help you improve data gathering reliability and increase data retrieval capacity across your mission-critical oil and gas operations.  

Contact us if you’re interested in leveraging AUTOSOL’s platform and edge-based polling capabilities in your oilfield.

Tags: data management, eACM, MQTT, reporting