Oilfield services company, Schlumberger, has partnered with technology development organization, Sintela, to co-develop new fiber-optic solutions in an agreement that will leverage industry-leading technologies from both companies to develop edge-enabled solutions that improve customer performance.
Sintela designs and delivers world leading fiber sensing systems for industrial markets including Energy, Power, Rail, Road, Security, Telecoms and Urban Monitoring.
Schlumberger is set to market and deliver the solutions in the energy, carbon capture and storage (CCS), and geothermal industries with Sintela delivering the combined solutions to other industrial markets.
The announcement detailed that the solutions would integrate intellectual property (IP) from Sintela’s distributed fiber-optic sensing (DFOS) portfolio with IP from Optiq Schlumberger fiber-optic solutions, enabling simpler, cost-efficient fiber-optic interrogator deployments and new digital workflow capabilities for improving the operational performance of Schlumberger’s customers.
Aparna Raman, President of Reservoir Performance at Schlumberger was keen to note that the company aims to deliver a range of fiber-optic solutions that enhance measurement data handling capability at the edge along with rapidly delivering actionable insights to upstream and midstream customers in domains such as geophysics, well integrity, production monitoring and pipeline monitoring.
“Sintela brings years of cross-industry research and development knowledge and experience with DFOS technologies—including optical interrogators—that we will leverage with our combined IP and industry domain knowledge to accelerate the pace of innovation, deploy solutions at scale, and develop more integrated and open workflows with customers, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML),” Raman added.
And according to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Sintela, Magnus McEwen-King, Schlumberger’s position as “a leader in the energy industry”, combined with their full suite of development technologies and digital workflows, made them the ideal alliance partner to co-develop these fiber-optic solutions.
“Our technology, combined with Schlumberger’s technology, footprint and domain expertise, will help customers in the energy, CCS, geothermal and other industries rapidly receive improved insights from edge processing of large data volumes acquired on fiber-optic sensors,” the CEO continued.
The first co-developed fiber-optic solutions for midstream are already available for leak and third-party intrusion detection, pig tracking and ground movement.
Other offerings, including edge-processing answer products for injection monitoring, well intervention and stimulation, will follow later in 2022.
Schlumberger has played an integral role in the development of Guyana’s oil and gas sector. The Company has set up a source storage and calibration facility at Houston, East Bank Demerara, on the outskirts of Georgetown to support offshore exploration and production activities.
