Weatherford – Intel collaboration on digital oilfield technologies

Weatherford International joined Intel Corporation at the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona (3 – 5 October 2017) to showcase the collaboration between the oilfield services provider and the technology giant and to demonstrate the benefits of bringing Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to the oil field.

Colin Tait, Director of Information Technology at Weatherford, stood alongside Jonathan Ballon, vice president in the Internet of Things Markets and Channels at Intel Corporation, during Ballon’s keynote on day one of the conference. The executives discussed how IoT-enabled oilfield devices can improve the efficiency and profitability of production operations, from surface equipment to the back office.

As a use-case example, the companies demonstrated how data collected by sensors on production equipment in the field can be transmitted to the cloud, or to a data center, by the Weatherford IoT gateway. The Intel® Secure Device Onboard service is used to securely onboard sensors and the Weatherford IoT gateway to Intel Wind River Helix Device Cloud for device management. After flowing through the gateway, sensor data can be visualized and analyzed using the Weatherford ForeSiteTM production optimization software. The ForeSite platform, released by Weatherford in May 2017, connects and analyzes data from across the production ecosystem to maximize asset performance.

“Collaborations with leading information technology companies like Intel enable us to extend the functionality of existing oilfield technologies,” said Tait. “By harnessing the power of cloud computing, advanced analytics and the IoT, we can build an end-to-end digital oilfield solution that yields greater efficiencies across the upstream oil and gas sector.”

“Oil and gas companies have a growing interest in using IoT strategies to transform their business operations by fully integrating equipment and systems—from the field to their operational and analytics backend,” added Dipti Vachani, vice president and general manager, Internet of Things Group at Intel. “Weatherford’s requirements for hardware assisted security, scalable device onboarding, and device management is a proving ground for IoT zero touch onboarding technologies. The combination of solutions will modernize how legacy oil field technologies can produce value for the industry.