28 April 2011
Oil industry professional and Synergy author Jason Conklin makes the case for using the best tool for well hierarchy alignment...and saving paper.
My job at Petrobakken involves calculating how much oil and gas we actually have left to produce over the next few years. Depending on the project I’m working on, I’m the guy who compares well hierarchies across the different department computer systems. I also look at production numbers to see how our wells are actually performing compared to our type-curve estimates.
Since these tasks can be pretty taxing, why would I make it harder on myself by not using the best tools for the calculations?
Instead of printing off ten pages every time they do a costing update, they print off one Synergy page. Not only does it save time, it saves paper!
I’m a big fan of Synergy, so co-workers will ask me, “What does it do?” What I tell the others at Petrobakken is, it gives you all the basic information you need to do your job. It gives you lease ops, daily production, and budget numbers. It will show working interest on wells; who has 100% and who has 50%. It does comparisons across systems and shows where errors lie, like who has the right UWIs and who doesn’t.
Basically, it makes my job easier and it saves me a ton of time.
I want to see if each system has the same number of wells, so I’m looking for good data health. The five systems I usually look at are QByte from accounting, Prism from production accounting, PVR for the field production reporting, Mosaic from engineering, and CS Explorer from the land department.
Occasionally a system will have a well that another system doesn’t, but sometimes it’s just human error. For example, somebody entered a well event as 0 in one system and it was entered as 2 in another, even though it’s the same well bore.
Using Synergy, it is really easy to find those errors. I mostly use Synergy’s UWI Matrix, Working Interest Matrix, and Hierarchy Matrix to see where those busts are.
I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to take advantage of live data if it’s there. Ninety percent of it is in your servers anyways.
Even accounting has come to me looking for pieces out of Qbyte. I put it all in one report for them. Instead of printing off ten pages every time they do a costing update, they print off one Synergy page. Not only does it save time, it saves paper! Synergy does whatever you want it to.
Another thing I like about Synergy is how easy it is to code because it uses SQL, which is as basic as you can get without going to binary code. Compared to C++, SQL is simple. Synergy is like Lego. You put the pieces together and run a report.
The way I program Synergy is that it is always pulling real time data. If somebody changes something in one of the systems, I see it right away in the reports. As soon as I hit Run again, I’ve got refreshed data in the report.
I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to take advantage of live data if it’s there. Ninety percent of it is in your servers anyways, with the exception of public data. Why wouldn’t you make use of it? With the way technology has evolved over the last ten years, computers are far faster than they were five years ago or, even, two years ago, so pulling large amounts of data is a non-issue.
Some people may be slow to install and start using Synergy, but change is slow in general. Some view it as just another software tool. The way I see it, at first it’s ridiculed, then you accept it, then you then you look back and say, “Hey, that was obvious. Why didn’t we do that sooner?” Well, I’m saving time by using it right now.
