Innovation and advancements in Arctic technology: enhancing research, management, and operations.

• Author: Griffin, Judy
• Position: OIL & GAS

From applications for mobile devices to aviation-borne remote sensing and drilling techniques that recover elusive compartmentalized pockets of oil, innovations and advancements in oil and gas industry technology are enhancing research, management, and operations.

Leveraging achievements of yesterday while enabling decision makers to realize future visions, applications of new technology in the Alaska oil and gas industry offer opportunities for obtaining and managing data and realizing greater operating efficiencies. Exploration, discovery, and processing activities continue to advance to the step of technological advancements that expand capabilities and provide new tools.

With extraction of easy oil in the rearview mirror, companies today are relying on the technological advancements of the "digital oil field" to leverage resources. In its 2008 report "Unleashing Productivity: The Digital Oil Field Advantage," management consulting firm Booz & Company explains, "Generally the digital oil field encompasses both the tools and the processes surrounding data and information management across the entire suite of upstream activities. More specifically, digital oil field technologies allow companies to capture more data, with greater frequency from all parts of the oil and gas value chain and analyze it in real or near-real time, thus optimizing reservoir, well, and facility performance."

In Alaska, as elsewhere, the benefits of modern information technology, automation, and communications are being harnessed to enhance operations. Wireless communication, collection of data from deployed sensors, and the abilities to remotely analyze real-time data during drilling operations coupled with drilling innovations are reducing environmental impacts and risks to personnel, as well as improving management capabilities.

Customized Software Applications Deliver Data

New software applications for cell phones, tablets, and laptops have enabled faster and easier retrieval of information from remote locations. Informed management in the oil and gas industry relies on up-to-date data on hydrology, habitat, and weather, as well as locations and conditions of roads, pads, pipelines, and facilities. "Decision makers need to know real time production and infrastructure status," says Howard Earl, Director of Sales and Marketing for Resource Data, Inc. (RDI). "In addition, field crews need to be able to record information in disconnected environments and transfer it reliably to centralized databases so that analysts and engineers can evaluate it."

Founded in Anchorage in 1986, RDI provides software solutions for data management and mapping from...