Data as an asset: What the oil and gas sector can learn from other industries about “Big Data”

Robert K. Perrons and Jesse W. Jensen

Energy Policy, 2015, vol. 81, issue C, 117-121

Abstract: The upstream oil and gas industry has been contending with massive data sets and monolithic files for many years, but “Big Data” is a relatively new concept that has the potential to significantly re-shape the industry. Despite the impressive amount of value that is being realized by Big Data technologies in other parts of the marketplace, however, much of the data collected within the oil and gas sector tends to be discarded, ignored, or analyzed in a very cursory way. This viewpoint examines existing data management practices in the upstream oil and gas industry, and compares them to practices and philosophies that have emerged in organizations that are leading the way in Big Data. The comparison shows that, in companies that are widely considered to be leaders in Big Data analytics, data is regarded as a valuable asset—but this is usually not true within the oil and gas industry insofar as data is frequently regarded there as descriptive information about a physical asset rather than something that is valuable in and of itself. The paper then discusses how the industry could potentially extract more value from data, and concludes with a series of policy-related questions to this end.

Keywords: Big data; Oil and gas; Information technologies; Data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421515000932
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:81:y:2015:i:c:p:117-121

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2015.02.020

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().