OPEC Jumps On The Big Data Bandwagon

While it tries to ‘fix’ the oil market with production cuts, OPEC is jumping on the big-data bandwagon and is launching an Oil and Gas Big Data Project to develop a tool for analyzing publicly available oil and gas data.

The OPEC Secretariat and the Ministry of Energy of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be seeking to develop “a sophisticated, comprehensive and easy-to-use multi-dimensional big data tool for analyzing publicly available oil and gas data,” OPEC said on Tuesday.

During the first phase of the project, OPEC and the UAE will develop a platform consisting of a set of analytics tools, optimization and statistical analysis techniques, interactive maps, charts, and data tables. The ultimate goal of the project, OPEC says, is to advance transparency and fill in analytics gaps by presenting oil and gas data in a comprehensive, user-friendly way.

Initially, the platform will be linked to publicly available oil market databases and will display raw figures, cross-comparing time series between countries, flows, and products. The use of web and text mining technology and techniques could be a follow-up phase to the project, OPEC said.

The results of the first phase of the project are scheduled to be presented in November in Abu Dhabi, when the second phase is expected to be launched.

The oil and gas industry—especially unconventional drilling in the U.S. and Big Oil—has started to embrace big data analytics and advanced computing that other industries have been using for years.

Related: Wall St. Gears Up For The World’s Biggest Oil Trade

Some experts believe that cloud computing will be one of the main IT trends for oil and gas this year, alongside the Internet of things, drones, intelligent rigs, and leak-detection software.

In the U.S. oil patch, data-analytics methodologies are being used to evaluate the economics and potential of shale assets by integrating data about the geology, completions, production, and leasing of the formations from public sources.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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