Abstract: The Reality of Dealing with Data

BATES, ROBERT, Aera Energy LLC, Bakersfield, CA; KAY PITTS, Aera Energy LLC., Bakersfield, CA 

Aera Energy LLC initiated a project in July 1998 to consolidate geoscience data from four legacy databases to one corporate database. Our data management problems had been compounded by our multiple legacy systems. The first phase of the project involved implementing the database solution, loading data from the legacy systems and creating processes to ensure integrity and security for petrophysical data.

The project was economically justified by anticipated savings from a reduction in petrophysical applications and associated IT support as well as increased productivity by geoscientists. We decided to purchase a commercial database as it provided us the best solution balancing product quality and speed of implementation.

When the first phase of the project was completed in May 1999, approximately 17,750 Unique Well Identifiers (UWI's) and 200,000 log curves had been migrated to the new database. We now have over 28,500 UWI’s and 472,500 curves in the database. One of the major challenges we have had the past year is to continue to add historic data while loading data from 600 newly drilled wells. The improved processes for quality control and loading of open-hole log data has resulted in fewer errors and reduced the cycle time.

Looking ahead, we plan to have log data loaded for 35,000 UWI's (approximately 95% of our total) by the end of 2000. The total number of log curves will be around 800,000. We are also building a process to quality control and load cased-hole surveillance log curves to this database.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90911©2000 AAPG Pacific Section and Western Region Society of Petroleum Engineers, Long Beach, California