Big Data has big potential in energy Posted on : May 05 - 2015

Drilling offshore requires big equipment, so it only makes sense for companies to benefit from Big Data.

Talk of new ways to harness data was among the key topics of discussion Monday as the Offshore Technology Conference kicked off.

Smart sensors and Big Data analytics could help oil companies extract an additional 80 billion barrels of oil around the world, about three years' worth of global crude supplies, GE executives said.

"The size of the prize is really big," Ashley Haynes-Gaspar, general manager in the software arm at GE Measurement & Control, said during a luncheon.

Over the past three years alone, GE has invested $1 billion in a software center in California dedicated to advancing the "industrial Internet," which is the combination of GE's capabilities in data analytics and its understanding of how equipment is used, which can be translated into physical models.

Many in the energy industry have far to go in adopting Big Data. For example, one independent producer had 40 computer systems collecting data from 4 million streams before GE pared it down to one system. View more