Time to standardise

Despite ever-greater attention to costs, the oil and gas industry is, according to IBM, spending $14bn this year on IT systems. Such an outlay would suggest that most players have cutting-edge and well integrated systems. With a few exceptions, the reality is rather different, reports Nigel Ash

UNTIL THIS year, a German energy firm, with highly sophisticated pipeline and processing systems, was receiving storage data from the other side of the country by fax transmissions throughout the day. Well-logging is still often conducted manually and emailed in a computer spreadsheet to a distant server. Production firms remain burdened with legacy systems and own mountains of data, in diverse formats, at un-networked locations, while running incompatible bits of software in different business areas. One might have imagined that $14bn would buy something better than this. The paradigm for highly automated process controls, from the intelligent oilfield, with its network of sensors, to the f