Perth-based data management company Tape Ark has completed a world first for the oil and gas exploration industry by demonstrating real-time seismic data acquisition using cloud storage rather than traditional tapes.
Chief executive Guy Holmes said the demonstration showed that data management and retrieval, which usually took between three and nine months, could be completed in a matter of minutes.
In the demonstration, seismic data obtained by an exploration company in Oklahoma was ‘ingested’ straight to the Amazon Web Services cloud in Virginia, then processed and interpreted in Australia and used by Mr Holmes on stage at a petroleum data conference in Houston.
The demonstration was undertaken in conjunction with seismic processing and interpretation software company DownUnder GeoSolutions and surface mapping company Petrosys, which are both based in Australia.
Mr Holmes said a typical seismic campaign like the one demonstrated would fill about 300 tapes with data.
These tapes need to be copied for off-site backup, then sent to third parties for processing and interpretation.
As the seismic data was analysed, he added, additional tapes needed to be created and copied and sent to joint venture partners and back-up storage locations, making for a slow and expensive process.
Using a cloud platform such as AWS, Mr Holmes said, the data could be immediately replicated and backed-up to a second location, while also being available for sharing globally.
“It cuts out every tape, automatically posts the data on their GIS database map, so they know what they’ve recorded in that area, and automatically scrapes all the metadata off, the name of the survey, the locations, the date; all the stuff that people spend months putting on a database is automated,” Mr Holmes told Business News.
The benefits included the ability for operators in the field to modify their seismic survey in response to real-time analysis conducted elsewhere.
“It’s super exciting in terms of the speed at which these people are going to get access to newly acquired data,” Mr Holmes said.
“The magic sauce is Tape Ark’s open petroleum data lake, which is basically a cloud-based storage repository that receives this data, creates the copies, and pushes it out and retrieves it from other sources.”
