Russia is among the world’s leaders in the petroleum industry with some of the largest reserves of both natural gas and crude oil. While the potential for massive economic benefit in the country is clear, there are still some hurdles on the production front that some oil and gas companies in Russia are seeking to remove using high-performance computing and cloud-based approaches.
IBM recently announced a collaboration to bring high-performance cloud computing tools and services to Russian State Gubkin Oil and Gas University and Gazprom Neft—NTTS.
The solutions IBM has been contracted to provide include those that will refine the processes by which geologists, geophysicists and oil engineers who manage gas field discovery, development, and daily tasks handle nearly every aspect of their operations.
A crucial aspect of IBMs involvement in the project is to provide a central processing and storage hub to handle geological and geophysical field data. The initial report on the collaboration indicated that the solutions will be “based on IBM’s Chemical and Petroleum Industry Information Framework…and will help increase the amount of prospected and explored resources, improve their recoverability, accelerate well completion, mitigate risks and reduce production costs.”
The first step of the collaboration will be to create an advanced collaboration environment or virtual workspace for geologists. This platform will allow geographically distributed scientists to build hydrodynamic 3D and 4D models together to better “interpret seismic study data using cloud computing technologies, distributed resource access, and model calculation and interpretation on IBM supercomputers located at Gubkin Oil and Gas University.”
IBM has significant experience in creating digital oil production management systems as well as geological modeling systems for major oil and gas corporations. Mikhail Strugov, who leads IBM Russia’s Oil and Gas division stated that this effort will mark “the first time an integrated platform is built in Russia to improve oil and gas facilities construction performance.”