It was April, 2010. Seventy miles offshore the US coast, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and spilled 210 million US gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico causing to date the largest oil spill in the history of petroleum exploration. It took six months of humongous effort to close the rig and control the spill. Some reports allege that the site was still leaking in 2012.

Around eleven people were missing and declared dead in the explosion. It had a devastating effect on the natural flora and fauna in the sea and resulted in huge losses to the surrounding fishing and tourism industry – to the tune of 30 billion US Dollars. A post-mortem to figure out the causes of the explosion and spill revealed, among the many reasons, issues like faulty readings of valve conditions, failures in valves, late spotting of leaks in the pipelines, and lack of alarms.

Oil drilling is a risky business. Minor errors can directly affect industries, economies, environment, health, and people’s lives – both in the short as well as the longer term. Minute and accurate monitoring of all stages of oil drilling is thus an extremely essential part of the whole process. There are thousands of sensors attached to various parts of drill bits and all other types of machinery in the oil rigs to allow minute control of operations.

The readings from these sensors are transferred from deep below the sea to the servers on the oil rig surface and from there to onshore monitoring centers where geologists, petrologists, engineers, and other operational staff monitor and analyze the data round the clock. There are several OEMs involved with thousands of types of machinery, sensors, and gauges. Thus in order to properly allow smooth data flowing between these multivendor components, a uniform protocol for capturing, transferring, and storage of the data was imperative. The Energistic Standards thus evolved over time, devising several protocols to do the same (WITSML for drilling and exploration data, PRODML for production data, and RESQML for reservoir data).

We have been working with the Energistic Standards for over 15 years now and have around 100 years ‘ worth of experience in delivering mission-critical software in this domain. We have built monitoring and alarm servers, visualization consoles, and central data sync servers – both on-premise as well as on the cloud (Azure). We have extensive knowledge of how alarms are generated, and what kind of visualization this domain mandates and are well conversant in properly dealing with the time sensitiveness of the data. We have been working with multiple national and international companies and have our software running on hundreds of rigs around the globe.