The Silicon Review ^Asia

Amid the procedure of ‘fixing’ the oil market with production slash,  OPEC organization is hopping on the big-data bandwagon and is launching an Oil and Gas Big Data Project in order to build up a tool for examining openly available oil and gas data.

The move has been made so that the OPEC Secretariat and the Ministry of Energy of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) can look to expand “a sophisticated, comprehensive and easy-to-use multi-dimensional big data tool for analyzing publicly available oil and gas data,” OPEC said on Tuesday.

However, it is expected that during the first phase of the project, OPEC and the UAE will build up a stage consisting of a set of analytics tools, optimization and statistical analysis techniques, interactive maps, charts, and data tables. As per OPEC, the eventual objective of the project is to go forward lucidity and fill in analytics gaps by presenting oil and gas data in an all-inclusive, user-friendly way.

Initially linked to publicly available oil market databases, the platform will exhibit raw figures, cross-comparing time series between countries, flows, and products. The use of web and text mining technology and techniques could be a follow-up phase to the project, OPEC said.

Further, based on the results of the first phase of the plan which is listed to be presented in November in Abu Dhabi, the second phase is predictable to be launched. The oil and gas industry particularly the unconventional drilling in the U.S. and Big Oil started to hold big data analytics and superior computing that other industries have been using for years.

According to few experts, cloud computing  this year will be one of the main IT trends for oil and gas beside the Internet of things, drones, intelligent rigs, and leak-detection software. However, in the U.S. oil patch, data-analytics methodologies are being used to ascertain the economics and possibility of shale assets by integrating data about the geology, completions, production, and leasing of the formations from public sources.