Technology now allows near-real time market intelligence
Market intelligence has evolved beyond word of mouth and government records.
Today, new technology from global positioning system tracking on mobile phones to satellite imaging, artificial intelligence and machine learning are providing near-real time gathering, processing and mapping of hundreds of millions of datapoints daily to provide market information on who is doing what and where.
But market intelligence goes beyond knowing about potential business or what competitors are doing.
For exploration and production companies, it offers a way to measure environmental performance, said Joshua Adler, founding chief executive officer of Sourcewater.
In this age of ESG – environment, social and governance – initiatives, being able to benchmark environmental performance is vital to attracting investors, retaining staff and continuing the social license to operate, Adler noted.
It’s also about improved performance, he noted.
“It’s about ‘How do I avoid damage and liability from external events like frac hits and earthquakes,” he said during a Webinar this week hosted by Hart Energy.
For operators, he said near real-time market intelligence can improve their bottom lines, helping them reduce labor costs by finding service crews closer to their sites, more efficiently using their supply chains to gather needed supplies and ranking not only their best and worst performing assets but ranking vendor performance.
For oilfield service companies, it helps win business from producers, identify assets that would benefit from their services and determine where and if they should buy or build facilities.
Mineral investors can better spot drilling and completion activity, and energy investors and analysts can more easily verify well inventory, cycle times, growth and productivity ahead of operators’ earnings calls, modeling supply and demand earlier and more accurately.
Improved logistics can mean safer roads because of not only less truck traffic but trucks being used in a more efficient manner. Noting that rig workers often spend up to 30 minutes a day seeking lease roads to get to the rig, napping lease roads lets them quickly drive well-to-well. Water disposal is also more efficient, Adler said. He cited the possibility of trucking flowback water to a commercial disposal site only to have trucks spend hours waiting to discharge the water. By driving an additional 10 minutes to another site, truckers could save on that wait time.
Sourcewater just launched its FracScape platform, offering daily pinpointing of frac and rig crews, truck traffic and drilled, uncompleted wells. The No. 1 reason operators utilize this platform is to avoid frac hits, Adler said. Communication of frac fluids between wells can result in massive losses if those frac hits damage a producing formation or wellbores, so knowing when a neighboring operator is going to frac his wells can be valuable, he explained.
While machine learning can’t replace the human eye, Adler said machine learning has gotten very good at categorizing images from satellites as, for example well pads, frac ponds or reserve pits, all indicators of planned activity.
Gloss