Bringing client/ server to the oil patch

Mexico pumped more crude oil than all but three other countries in the world in 1994. Production levels exceeded 2.68 million barrels a day by the end of the year, and have been climbing higher under Mexico’s energy-sector growth and privatization plans for specialized areas. With 100,000 employees, the state-owned petroleum company, Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), is at the heart of all this activity. In fact, Pemex controls nearly every aspect of the exploration, production, distribution, refinery and sale of Mexico’s energy products.

UNIFACE applications have proven stable across the enterprise, from Pemex’s headquarters in Mexico City to platforms in the sea.

Compuware’s UNIFACE application development toolset has helped a Pemex business unit break new ground, too. Today, new UNIFACE client/server applications give Pemex engineers quick access to critical data, and manage pivotal operations within the Pemex group responsible for oil production. The applications were developed rapidly, are easy to maintain, and have proven stable across the enterprise, from corporate headquarters in Mexico City to platforms in the sea, says Jorge Calvillo, manager of the computing group in Pemex’s Southeast Marine Region Production Area.

Partnering with a systems integrator

emex’s production unit has been moving from PC and minicomputer applications and paper-intensive processes to client/server for the last few years. As part of that move, the unit installed several commercial applications developed especially for the petroleum industry. Those applications run on a mixture of UNIX servers from Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, databases from Oracle and Sybase, and Windows and Motif clients. For certain strategic applications, however, the business unit wanted to develop custom applications rather than license packaged solutions. Calvillo’s first step was to seek the assistance of Premium International de Mexico, a systems integrator headquartered in Mexico City that specializes in client/server architectures.

Although Premium had not used UNIFACE in the petroleum industry before then, the systems integrator recommended the toolkit after evaluating several alternatives with Pemex. The mixture of software and hardware platforms already adopted by Pemex factored into the evaluation. ‘We needed a development environment that worked equally well in the world of PCs, workstations and UNIX servers. UNIFACE was the best product that satisfied our requirements,’ says Ricardo Sierra, software director at Premium, which has been recommending UNIFACE to its clients ever since.

‘Another important feature was that our developers could work on the hardware we have in place at Premium and later deploy their application on Pemex’s platforms,’ adds Sierra. His colleagues use PCs, SCO UNIX servers and Oracle databases. ‘This is great for us because we can’t duplicate all of the equipment that Pemex or our other clients own.’

Today, Premium has more than 30 developers working in UNIFACE. At first, they had to learn the concepts of model-driven development. ‘After we understood this approach, development went quickly,’ says Sierra. The developers began constructing the application after they completed the application model, which eased the process of prototyping and making changes to the code later.

Engineers no longer dig for data

The first application the partners tackled in UNIFACE also was the most important. Now deployed, the application helps more than 200 petroleum engineers mine a wealth of technical data about Pemex’s production process. For the first time, data that had been stored in several different databases or on sheaves of paper is available in a central repository. Engineers stationed across Marina Region easily share and obtain such detailed information as geophysical logs, laboratory results, production rates, histories of interventions to wells and more. The UNIFACE application, called SITP (Well Technical Information System), also interfaces with several other software systems like simulation and characterization software.

‘It’s been a big deal for Pemex to have all this technical data in one central repository,’ Calvillo says. ‘Before this application, engineers spent 80% of their time researching and integrating the information they needed - much of it on paper - and spent 20% of their time making important decisions. With this new application, we’re trying to reverse that percentage. ’Pemex currently stores the technical data in a single Oracle database; plans call for distributing Oracle databases throughout Pemex’s production areas. ‘There had been attempts over the last 20 years to create systems similar to this, but the costs of these systems ran high and they weren’t working,’ Calvillo adds.

‘Pemex wasn’t familiar with UNIFACE, so we were anxious about using the development tool for this project,’ Calvillo explains. ‘The main benefit of UNIFACE is that, in just seven months, our engineers gained a resource that they never had before.’

Along with the central repository application, Pemex has deployed several other UNIFACE applications. One of them calculates the company’s production rate of gas and oil by 9 a.m. each day, based on raw data entered by employees at remote production platforms. Another application coordinates the maintenance of millions of dollars worth of production equipment on the platforms. ‘The systems are incredibly stable,’ Calvillo says.

More applications on tap

Pemex has contracted with Premium for maintenance of the UNIFACE applications now in place and for assistance in developing new applications. Among the UNIFACE applications planned for the future is a geographic information system (GIS) to analyze and track geographically-oriented data. Another application will cost the production of barrels of petroleum.

Pemex also is training end users in UNIFACE Personal Series, data retrieval and reporting tools that complement the UNIFACE development environment. With Personal Query and Personal Access, end users will be able to cut and paste data from their UNIFACE applications into spreadsheets and third-party applications designed to handle precise calculations. End users will also be able to easily create reports from that data.

Setting a standard