- Development of digital oil field system for use at energy resource development sites
- Installation of in-house platform to collect, analyze and remotely manage field data
 

POSCO ICT (CEO Choi Doo-whan) is developing the high tech ICT-based digital oil field (DoF) system for application to energy resource development sites including oil, gas and shale.

POSCO ICT and Energy Holding Group Inc. (CEO Howard Park), an energy resource development service company, have disclosed that they will jointly execute a national policy research project for the development of a “DoF system applicable to small to medium-sized energy resource development sites” sponsored by the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning under the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Energy. Scheduled for completion by the end of the year, the proposed DoF system will be designed to monitor the entire process of exploration, drilling and production in order to provide a wide range of oil well information through big data analysis. The system ultimately developed as a result of this research will be applied in overseas development fields operated by domestic energy resource development companies in the public and private sectors.

The new system will compute an optimal equipment and facility operational plan after collecting and analyzing data from an energy resource development site in real time based on PosFrame, the smart industry platform developed by POSCO Group. For example, IoT sensors will be installed in key field devices to monitor operating status of facilities in real time and remotely manage and automatically control the equipment by analyzing big data to inform the operator of maintenance requirements. As the system will be designed to operate in the cloud form, even small production fields will benefit from the service without having to implement it in house.

Following its completion by the end of the year, the DoF system will be used in small oil fields in the state of Alberta, Canada as part of the optimization process, before being extended to other fields operated by government-owned energy resource development companies and eventually to small and medium-sized development fields operated by commercial enterprises in China, Southeast Asia, North America, and the Middle East.

“The demand for DoF systems is continuously growing as energy resource development companies are actively considering its implementation as a means of reducing the operating costs of energy resource development as the price of oil has remained low for some time. The market forecast for the new system is very bright because no such technology has been applied to small and medium-sized energy resource development sites so far, and Korea is operating more than 4,000 small and medium-sized oil wells in Canada alone,” explained by POSCO ICT official.