SPE Tech Talk 2024: Streamlining Disjointed Workflows Using ComboCurve, with Marathon Oil

Featuring: 

Ryan James, Senior Reservoir Engineer, Marathon Oil 
Trevor Owen, Director of Technical Engineering, ComboCurve
Dylan Breaux, Senior Technical Engineer, ComboCurve 

Moderated by: Trent Jacobs, Senior Technology Editor, Society of Petroleum Engineers International 

“We’ve brought everything into ComboCurve now.  Everyone’s looking at production data and it’s really nice to be able to pull it up online. It’s pretty simple for people to get up the learning curve. It is becoming our single source of truth for production forecasting and type curves now, while still giving people the flexibility to use other tools.”

– Ryan James, Senior Reservoir Engineer, Marathon Oil 

 

ComboCurve hit the market in 2020 to address complexities many reservoir engineering teams are facing: disjointed workflows, team-to-team silos, and integrating multiple workflows together across these different teams.  

In this SPE Tech Talk, ComboCurve Engineers Trevor Owen and Dylan Breaux are joined by Senior Reservoir Engineer Ryan James, of Marathon, to address these challenges and how Marathon has used ComboCurve to overcome some of them.  

The talk begins by addressing the effect disjointed workflows can have on a company. For instance, Marathon Oil sought a more integrated solution for their production forecasting needs as a business, turning to ComboCurve as a key partner.  

 

The Challenge of Working With Disjointed Workflows

As organizations grow and new data or processes are introduced, workflows begin to accumulate and can become duplicative. Teams often spend 30-40% of their time QC’ing data or workarounds supported through integrations to other be-spoke tools, which prevents engineering dollars from being fully utilized. 

“We could rectify that at the end of the year, but at the end of the day, we’re trying to make business decisions, properly understand our risk and be confident whether we’re renewing out borrowing base or making an acquisition.” – Dylan Breaux, Senior Technical Engineer, ComboCurve 

Ryan describes how Marathon Oil’s use of legacy tools presented significant challenges, particularly the use of disparate systems for reserves forecasting, monthly updates, type curves, and production data. These disjointed workflows resulted in mismatched data, causing delays in decision-making and hindering collaboration between teams. Their existing tools also lacked the real-time data integration required for rapid, accurate forecasting and decision-making across the Delaware Basin.  

“When you’re worried about whether the data is the same in this system as it is in that system, you’re suffering from a non-unified workflow. In the past, we spent more time making sure our numbers tied to each other rather than doing the technical work and adding value.” – Ryan James, Senior Reservoir Engineer, Marathon Oil

Marathon’s Success With an Integrated Platform

Marathon Oil used ComboCurve to consolidate reserves management, production forecasts, and type curve analysis into one platform. With real-time integration of production data and a tool built for purpose with an intuitive web-based interface, Marathon Oil streamlined their workflows, ensuring all teams worked from a single source of truth.  

“We’ve built a platform where we try to keep you in it as much as possible, where you can forecast, type curve and run your economics. And it’s a user-friendly tool as well.”– Dylan Breaux, Senior Technical Engineer, ComboCurve

 

One Outcome of Consolidated Workflows 

By streamlining production forecasting, Marathon Oil more rapidly accesses unified critical business information, enhancing decision-making across the business. Ryan remarks that this has large improved efficiency, accuracy, and speed.  

“Unifying the whole workflow starts with the data, getting everything into a consolidated place. And really making sure you have a golden standard that everybody can access and interact with.” – Trevor Owen, Director of Technical Engineering, ComboCurve

 

Other Known Benefits from Unifying Data and Workflows

1. Increased Operational Efficiency: Unified workflows and real-time data integration, reduced time spent cross-verifying data between multiple platforms and teams.
   

   “Making sure everything talks to each other seamlessly is key in simplifying our systems.” – Ryan James, Senior Reservoir Engineer, Marathon Oil 

2. Faster, Accurate Forecasting: Generated more reliable production forecasts, directly impacting their ability to make informed, timely decisions.
   

   “When everybody is working off the same sheet, it’s easy to get the right answers. Whereas you’re loading it from spreadsheets, it takes a little while and sometimes errors don’t even get caught.” – Ryan James, Senior Reservoir Engineer, Marathon Oil
   

3. Seamless Collaboration between teams: Improved cross-team collaboration, significantly reducing delays associated with misaligned data from different systems.
   

   “Companies that find the most success bring in multiple teams – not only the reservoir engineers, but their production engineers to help understand the planning, their workovers. Landmen and even the accounting teams working off the ‘same sheet of music,’ and everyone is more confident, allowing them to act with more agility.”  – Dylan Breaux, Senior Technical Engineer, ComboCurve 

4. Time Savings: Centralizing data reduced the time spent searching for and compiling information, freeing up the engineers to focus on high-value tasks that drive business impact.
   

   “Number one thing is time-savings. When you make searching for data easy, you’re reducing time to value– that’s real.” – Ryan James, Senior Reservoir Engineer, Marathon Oil 

5. Cost Savings: Lowered software costs, more efficient resource allocation, and improved investment decisions.  
   

   “As an engineer, we’re responsible for high dollar decisions, so being able to take that time back of maintaining things from a database infrastructure perspective is valuable. I now have everything in that one spot that has a utility, and it’s built for purpose.” – Trevor Owen, Director of Technical Engineering, ComboCurve