Recently, the oil and gas industry has experienced a sharp decline in prices. “This puts a strain on cash flows and project economics,” explains Brent Haas, vice president of engineering. “But R. Lacy Services is looking to grow. We see these times as an opportunity to acquire oil and gas assets at lower evaluations. Exploration and production is a very data-driven business, and our overarching business goals are to make better business decisions in developing our own assets as well as acquiring new oil and gas properties.

“Our goal is to give decision-makers 24/7 access to the data, so they can drill down to the granular level and help make better decisions that will ultimately improve the profitability of our company,” says Mr. Haas. “R. Lacy is an efficient, low-cost operator, and we want to leverage our talents and find high quality acquisition candidates that will give us a large amount of development inventory.

“Some of the roadblocks that we had were inefficient data capture, and data stored in multiple sources. We needed a system that could combine it all so our analytics would be more efficient. If we didn’t remove these inhibitors, there was the potential for revenue loss due to inefficient operations as well as potentially missing acquisition opportunities.”

“I’ve been a TIBCO Spotfire® user for seven years,” continues Haas, “And I was hired by R. Lacy in 2014 as part of a growth initiative. Spotfire was one of the platforms I brought to the company to help us achieve our objectives.

“The engineering department is using Spotfire to put our fingertips on the data we need to help the company maximize its assets. It’s really having an impact on overall profitability.

“It’s a very intuitive tool, and when we needed additional support, we’ve leveraged TIBCO Professional Services to help us with custom solutions.”

More Efficient Analytical Processes
R. Lacy used TIBCO Professional Services to better integrate decline curve analysis into its processes. This analysis is a way to predict future well production based on its past performance and is used to identify production problems and predict well lifespan.

“Our primary market drivers are the price of oil and gas as well as the cost of extracting it from our reservoirs. TIBCO professional services helped us implement a template that brought decline curve analysis into Spotfire. It’s really improved the efficiency of our reserves analysis,” says Mr. Haas.

Better Understanding of Acquisition Targets

Mr. Haas says that Spotfire has also helped the company find high-quality assets, which was a key goal. “Combining our mapping, decline curve analysis, and data analytics into one package in Spotfire has helped us become more efficient in our acquisition efforts and helped us target the highest performing areas.

“A lot of our acquisition efforts are focused on unconventional resource plays, and these plays have a lot of interrelated dependencies. Spotfire allows us to bend the data and filter it on-the-fly, so we can really get down and understand what is driving well productivity.”

Enhanced Cash Flow
Spotfire analytics has also helped improve production. “With the ability to link our financial database and our production systems in Spotfire, we’ve been able to more efficiently identify poor performing wells and address problems with workovers or recompletions to enhance our cash flow,” says Haas.

Self-Service Speed and Empowerment
“One of our requirements was a tool that would be intuitive, flexible, and easy to use, something that would help us avoid a lot of IT development,” says Haas. “Spotfire allows us to build the analytics dashboards we need on the fly.”
 

“With our strong foundation in data analytics, we intend to identify high-quality acquisition targets that can give us a large amount of development inventory,” concludes Haas.