The world is truly opting to go all-in on open source. With the creation of the Open Subservice Data Universe, known as OSDU, the oil and gas industry is opening its exploration and production data and inviting the entire energy sector to join in the collaboration.

“From exploration all the way to production in a single data platform,” is how Johan Krebbers (pictured, right), general manager for digital emerging technologies and vice president of information technology innovation at Royal Dutch Shell PLC., described the project.

“Our objective is that in the next five years, OSDU will become the key backbone for energy companies to store data, apply artificial intelligence, and optimize the whole energy supply chain,” Krebbers said.

Krebbers and Liz Dennett (pictured, left), lead solutions architect at Amazon Web Services Inc., spoke with Rebecca Knight, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit. They discussed how the Open Group OSDU Forum is reinventing the energy data platform. (* Disclosure below.)

More efficient research and greener energy solutions

The story starts in summer 2017 when Krebbers’ department met with representatives from Shell’s gas exploration division. They had what seemed a simple request: Help us find our data.

“Of course, they’ve got lots and lots of data, but they were unable to find the right data they needed to work from [because] the data was scattered all over the place,” Krebbers said.

Enlisting the help of AWS and Accenture plc, Shell set out to combine its data resources into a single data platform for ease of access. But the company saw that the solution would be more powerful if it were industrywide. So, it invited others to join.

“We reached out to about eight or nine other large oil and gas operators … and said, ‘Hey, we shall do this; do you want to join this effort?’” said Krebbers, who admitted, “I was surprised they all said yes!”

“I’m a geologist. I’ve spent more than 70% of my time trying to find data in these silos,” Dennett added, confirming the issue was industrywide.

A recipe for open collaboration

The first problem to solve was that data was linked to specific software applications, meaning no other applications could access it. Once that link was broken, the data was freed and opened for access by any approved application. This meant the data silos could be destroyed and the data moved into the centralized platform. Next, an application programming interface layer was created on top to allow the ecosystem to form.

“You might have a data platform, but you’re only successful if you have a rich ecosystem for people to start developing applications on top,” Krebbers said. And it’s those applications that make the data accessible across large and small companies, researchers and universities.

Adding data from alternative energy producers, such as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and hydrogen, is the emphasis for the next year, according to Krebbers. “So it becomes an open energy data platform not just for the oil and gas industry, but for any type of energy industry,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit. Neither Accenture LLP, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE