The Digital Transformation Journey from Digitization to Opportunity Generation

Abstract

Abstract Throughout the history of subsurface exploration, the energy industry has acquired, recorded, and archived extremely valuable subsurface data (including new data) on legacy and new media such as round reel magnetic tape (14-track, 7-track, 21-track, 9-track, etc. circa 1950s), square cartridge tape (3480, 3490, 3590, 3592 series, LTO series, 8mm, 4mm, etc. circa 1980s), optical media (CD, DVD, etc.), and hardcopy documents. The physical media are boxed, inventoried and stored in climate controlled salt mines and/or warehouses. Pertinent media with high priority datasets are recalled from storage, transcribed, and made available for processing, interpretation, data rooms, etc. The challenges associated with the physical storage construct of these assets include residual storage and shipping costs, pace of deterioration of legacy media, delayed access to requested dataset, valuable data locked away and inaccessible, amongst others. To combat these challenges, ExxonMobil initiated a strategic, upstream wide, digital transformation partnership with Katalyst Data Management whose mission is to increase opportunity generation by reducing the turnaround time of high priority datasets and providing access to previously undiscoverable data. The digital transformation partnership leveraged the latest tools, technologies, and techniques including enhanced metadata capture, live/automated QC, parsers and loaders, data analytics, automated metadata extraction, etc. In addition, petroleum data management standards and best practices were employed across the digitization value chain. The digitization of nearly 3 million hardcopy paper or mylar documents and more than 420,000 seismic tapes to date (as of July, 2020) has eliminated recurring physical storage costs, recovered valuable data from deteriorating media, shortened access to high priority datasets from weeks to hours, and provided access to previously undiscoverable "dark" data. Other digitization ‘wins’ include the elimination of the need for ExxonMobil to maintain facilities and hard drives to read physical media. This strategic partnership between ExxonMobil and Katalyst Data Management has led to the convergence of digital data from multiple physical data sources and data types, all on a single integrated subsurface domain agnostic platform. More importantly, it has enabled Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning use cases bringing about business insights and leading to prospect opportunity generation.