SAP OIL and GAS Interview Questions and Answers

SAP OIL and GAS Interview Questions and Answers

   What are offshore installations ?

Oil and gas offshore installations are industrial towns at sea, carrying the personnel and equipment needed to access reservoirs thousands of feet below the seabed, and maintain continuous hydrocarbon production. The most important functions are drilling, preparing water or gas for injection into the reservoir, processing the oil and gas before sending it ashore, and cleaning the produced water for disposal into the sea.  

Big fixed platforms may have all these functions in one location, but smaller platforms may be dedicated to just one function, such as drilling or gas compression. Some installations can be moved from one location to another, for example mobile drilling rigs and production FPSOs.

   What are onshore installations ?

These are installations on land and usually close to the sea which receive oil and gas from offshore installations via pipeline (or in the case of oil sometimes by tanker). These installations prepare the liquid products for further refining - but they are not the refineries. They also take the natural gas and make it suitable for piping into the National Grid. At some installations gas liquids are processed.

   What actually happens offshore ?

• The popular image of offshore work often centers on a muddy drill floor, where wells are drilled to target the reservoirs of oil and gas below the surface - but this is only the beginning of the story.

• The top end of each production well sprouts a branching series of pipes, gauges and valves called the 'Christmas tree'. At this point, crude oil is a hot, frothy, corrosive, high-pressure fluid containing gas, water and sand.

• After separation, the crude oil is metered and pumped into the pipeline, or stored until sent ashore by tanker.

• The gas separated from the oil may be used for fuel, or compressed and piped to shore or re-injected into the reservoir. Any gas that cannot be used is burnt in the platform's flare, very little gas is now flared.

• Processing systems for the gas fields of the southern North Sea are relatively simple. The gas liquids are removed and then the gas is compressed, cooled, dehydrated and metered before being piped to shore.

• All production and drilling systems have to be monitored constantly for leaks, since oil and gas are hazardous and extremely flammable.

• There is no mains electricity offshore! Power has to be generated on the installation to drive production and drilling equipment, and to support life.

• In other words, offshore installations are packed with complex equipment and systems that need to be operated and maintained safely by highly skilled people who understand the technology and the processes involved, and who can work together in integrated teams. 

   How SAP Solution Integrates Upstream Oil & Gas Operations ?

• Upstream oil & gas production involves specific requirements and business processes that are unique to this industry. Unlike in the downstream sector, business processes in the upstream oil & gas sector are not well integrated. This is partially due to organizational issues and partially due to the fact that upstream organizations typically use a handful of best-in-breed applications and numerous Excel spreadsheets, rather than a well-integrated solution.

• These business processes include work-over management, production planning and allocations, contractor management and maintenance scheduling, production reporting, and others. Without clear visibility into field variables and constraints, operations planners don't have the information they need to make the best decisions. This often results in sub-optimal planning, inefficient use of both physical and human resources, higher costs, and increased risk.

• As ARC Advisory Group learned in a recent briefing, SAP has targeted this problem by developing an Upstream Operations Management (UOM) solution that the company has integrated with other SAP products to provide interoperability across systems and processes and visibility into upstream operations, maintenance, engineering, and planning. The ultimate goal, of course, is to help maximize monetization of hydrocarbons.

   How Upstream Operations Works ?

• Upstream Operations Management

• Gaining an overall picture of a global energy company's upstream operations can be incredibly difficult. This is because each business line will tend to manage complex resources with a focus on its own information and performance goals. Nevertheless, to be able to optimize multiple (often interactive) variables, a company requires a master view. Moreover, to maximize monetization of hydrocarbons, an energy company must be able to answer essential questions such as:

• What did our assets produce? What impact will specific changes have on production?

• To create the most accurate plans, upstream operators need complete visibility into all activities that impact delivery at the tailgate or custody transfer points. These include physical constraints, planned and unplanned logistic constraints, and planned maintenance and work-overs. SAP UOM supports three core functions to facilitate workflow: field data capture, production allocation and planning, and operations performance analysis.

• Field Data Capture

• Upstream oil & gas operating companies can complete upstream allocations using SAP MII to integrate and validate field data from process historians. Field measurements, well test downtime measurements, and production measurements from highly instrumented fields are captured via industry best practices. Well downtime information from a variety of sources can also be integrated into SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) to improve maintenance planning activities. Since many onshore fields will have limited automation systems, users can leverage the SAP mobility platform to capture data in the field.

   How Production Allocation and Planning will be done ?

• Production allocation functions in SAP UOM take data from various sources and make it visible to production accountants via a simple-to-use work center interface. This interface makes it relatively easy for the production accountants to determine hydrocarbon and water volumes, masses, and energy content. The system is loaded into a user-defined network object via MII and rules applied to allocate oil, gas, water, and condensate. The production accountants can then complete custody transfer to transfer points or a target delivery system. Users can easily determine what was produced; what can be produced; and perform further analysis for longer range planning; plan vs. actual, and apply chemical analysis data to perform allocations at either the component or full product stream level. Key production allocation-related capabilities include:

• Top-down and bottom-up allocation of hydrocarbons inclusive of oil, gas, water etc. Determining commingled well completion and intra-month structure.

• Handling through gathering systems/pipelines, as well as through the outlet of gas processing facilities.

• Chemical analysis as a method to capture gas components.

• Network modeling to replicate field configurations

• Mass, energy, and volume dimension allocation

• Determining capacity and planned vs. actual allocation

  How to use Upstream Operations Reporting and Analytics ?

• Upstream oil & gas enterprises can use SAP's integrated analytics solution to address key business questions. Production engineers can determine the performance trend of the target gas and oil wells and better understand factors that impact production. The SAP UOM solution is also integrated with SAP Business Warehouse.

• As an example of a typical query, a production engineer can launch a report from the SAP UOM Portal to determine and compare the daily production quantities of well completions across a network along with the relevant medium (hydrocarbons or water) and quantity. This report can also show associated details such as downtime, well tests, measurement data, and lifecycle status for a particular network on a particular production date.

  How In-memory computing supports in Transformation of the Traditional IT Stack

• SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) is a core element to the UOM solution. SAP now uses a new in-memory computing technology called HANA. According to SAP, this has transformed the current BW IT stack to support reporting and analytics.

• In today's fast-paced environment, people expect instant response when searching for information on the Internet. Workers expect the same response from enterprise systems. The amount of enterprise data typically doubles every 18 months and, according to SAP, HANA technology is capable of providing 3,600 times faster analytics to allow deeper data interrogation. This can increase the number of times a user can analyze the data within a given time frame. In-memory computing moves the computing task from the computer disk drive to the local memory so that results of complex analysis and transactions are available at the user's fingertips, either on his or her desktop or smartphone.

• Recent improvements in hardware and the economics of memory have opened up new possibilities to create a shift in the computing architecture. In addition to creating hardware structures based on 8 x 8 cores per blade, software has also been redesigned to provide row and column store, compression, and insert only on delta. Microprocessors historically sit idle for long periods and data are not stored the way that business users ask questions. Eighty percent of the business system inquiries use only 20 percent of the data.

• SAP currently has over 40 applications that support HANA technology, including SAP BW.