Metaverse: Accelerates Upstream Growth with the Power of Immersive Collaboration

Abstract

Abstract The global transition towards sustainable future influenced industries to create a fundamental shift in the way they conduct the business to improve sustainability. This paper presents a comprehensive immersive platform that enables multidisciplinary teams and management to make decisions. It connects professionals to collaboratively demonstrate and share findings, run cross-functions business processes in an intuitive way capitalizing on artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities. All of this is under a unified platform that we called the Upstream Metaverse. There are four pillars for the Upstream Metaverse: digital assets, real-time collaboration, intelligence, and venues. First digital assets, which include visualization of reservoir simulation static and dynamic properties (e.g., porosity, permeability, water, oil saturation, etc.), other datatypes such as core and well log data. Second is the collaboration and interactive capabilities that allows engineers to be immersed into their models, and run different scenarios. Third is the intelligent layer, which capitalizes on available Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0) solutions. Fourth is the collaboration venues represented by the Upstream collaboration centers to maximize the user experience. A synthetic model was used in this paper to demonstrate well placement process, which is one of the Upstream complex processes as it involves many stakeholders. Upstream Metaverse streamlined the process by integrating the key data, and workflows needed for the decision process in a single platform. It enables multiple intuitive visualization methods of well logs to address the complexity. In addition, it provides the visualization of structured data including reservoir models that can be cross-referenced with well logs. Moreover, it provides seamless integration with an intelligent voice assistant to enrich the user experience. These capabilities allow multidisciplinary teams to run different business scenarios, conduct effective field reviews, and collaboratively discuss their findings in an interactive and immersive platform. This allows real-time collaboration around the data for all participants. Furthermore, coupling Upstream Metaverse with digital transformation solutions provides a rich platform that is capable to effectively facilitate the meetings. Also, capitalizing on the integrated data sources, and cross-organization functions combined with streamlined IR4.0 processes enabled on spot decision making. The Upstream Metaverse established the main building blocks that are fully integrated with data repositories to address current and future challenges. This will directly increase the efficiency of conducting Upstream cross-functions operations through a single, unified, immersive, and collaborative platform. Upstream Metaverse is a sustainable environment that reduces the need for sequel meetings, supplemental silo efforts, and computation resources.