Caroline Collective

Caroline extends a warm welcome to another new Member, Wellstorm Develepmont, who provide information technology services for oil and gas developers.

Wellstorm has built a software platform that collects, analyzes, and distributes “enterprise drilling information.”

Drilling is one of the most capital intensive activities in oil and gas production. As a key aspect of optimizing drilling operations, oil companies are demanding that drilling contractors and service companies deliver drilling information to them electronically. A new family of standards have emerged — WITSML (pronounced “wits emm ell”) — which stands for “Well Information Transfer Standard Markup Language”; and Wellstorm has been a leader in the definition and implementation of those standards.

So now there are all these new data types describing all kinds of activity on the rig. Some data are used for real time decision making about geosteering or drilling. Some data are used more retrospectively. Some data enables developing new analytical techniques along with new ways of incorporating operational data into back office business processes.

Wellstorm software serves as an aggregation point for all this data. Oil company engineers and geologists connect third party applications to a Wellstorm server to receive real time data, to query historical data and to make operational decisions.

Beyond supporting daily operations, Wellstorm offers business intelligence analysis based on that data so that oil companies can optimize their drilling performance. Getting the most value for their drilling dollar is a major concern for North American land operators, who are drilling more more than half the wells in the world at any given time. Wellstorm analytics help an oil company compare drilling operations across their contractors, rigs, crews, and regions to identify and remove inefficiencies in order to drill more wells more effectively.