Pdvsa – a Tidal Wave of Data

PDVSA – A TIDAL WAVE OF DATA

A National Oil Company looks to manage its G&G data by Gordon Cope

“We need to improve the way Venezuela is the undisputed giant of the South American petroleum sector, with almost 80 billion barrels of proven conventional oil reserves and 151 that people create trillion ft3 of natural gas. In the early 20th century, Venezuela began producing oil from the immense Bolivar coastal field. Since then, dozens of major fields and use the data” have been discovered in the Lake Maracaibo region as well as the Orinoco Sandro Lanoy Belt, site of 270 billion barrels of heavy oil and bitumen. Today, it produces approximately 3 million b/d, much of which is exported to the United States and other consuming nations.

With almost a century of petroleum history under its belt, it comes as no surprise that an immense amount of exploration and production data has been accumulated, much of it difficult to access. “A lot of sectors in our company don’t have quality data,” says Sandro Lanoy, a data manager at the data support centre for Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA, pronounced pay-day-VAY-sa), the Venezuelan state oil company. “We want to improve the availability of data, and we’re looking for the best way to do it. There is no formal plan yet, we are researching all the possibilities.”

In 2006, a delegation from PDVSA attended the annual PPDM conference in Houston. “We saw the value of PPDM,” recalls Lanoy. In 2007, a similar delegation attended the conference in Calgary in order to learn more about how to use standardized data management to help their task. “We would like to prepare a national database, one that organizes all the data we have. That would include seismic, production, well logs, petrophysical, chemistry, core and photo data.”

In addition to the immense backlog of oil and gas information, PDVSA expects a veritable tidal wave of new data over the coming decades. Plans for the next 25 years include over $50 billion worth of investments to not only maintain conventional production, but to tap the vast heavy oil and tar sands

Professional Petroleum in the Orinoco Belt. ThousandsData ofManagement kilometres of seismic willAssociation be shot, and a host of new wells drilled. “We need to improve the way that people create and use the data,” says Lanoy. “We’d like to train everyone, and also put in processes to improve the quality of new data.”

As a starting point, they are interested in creating the opportunity for the 20,000 PDVSA employees to learn more. “We’d like to see a PPDM conference in Caracas so that the people of Venezuela, and all the people of South America, could attend and see its value,” says Lanoy.

Sandro Lanoy is a data manager at the data support centre for PDVSA. lanoys@pdvsa.com

PPDM Association Suite 202, 621 4th Ave SW Calgary, AB, Canada T2P 0K2 Phone: 1 403-660-7817 Fax: 1 403-660-0540 Email: [email protected] Web: www.ppdm.org Copyright 2010, PPDM Association, All Rights Reserved.