High-performance computing in oil and gas: processing big data for more efficient energy
As the energy industry moves its focus to automation, digitisation and IoT, how on earth do these companies process ever-growing, enormous amounts of data into something practical?
High-performance computing (HPC) has proven vital for effective analytics and modelling for the oil and gas industry. It’s considered by many to be the ‘enigma machine’ powerful enough to quantify the volumes generated by not just operational data, but explorative data as well.
Analysing a brave new world
Modern exploration technologies such as Seismic mapping, 3D models and AI-constructed simulations all generate 10 times the data of more standard equipment sensors. So, the infrastructure tasked with analysing it all needs to have some heft behind it.
Executives might be hesitant to invest in HPC to process the data from the IoT technologies they’ve also just invested in, but the opportunities that this explorative data affords is practically exponential. After all, AI and machine learning will increase the speed of research and reduce time-to-results – and can also help to lessen environmental impact.
One interesting example of using HPC for exploratory purposes is the case of oil reservoir development. In one case, the teams at Zenotech and E.On partnered to better understand a reservoir that was to be developed. With the power of cloud HPC, they could better understand the shape of the reservoir, the height of the oil column, and the porosity of the rocks containing the oil, and more. With this modelling, the team was able to recover nearly 80% of the oil, beating typical good recovery ranges of 50-70%.
The best solution to the problem of data
HPC has the ability to solve very complex problems very quickly, as integrated asset information cloud services provide real-time alerts and can generate immediate action automatically. What’s really exciting is that this can take place across the kind of widespread geographies that oil and gas companies tend to be spread.
To achieve this, it’s far better to run your high-performance computing in the Cloud, as it allows larger numbers of parallel tasks to be massively scaled up and down, with results that would not be possible by running a private capital-intensive data centre. Regardless of which solution is chosen, IoT and HPC are vital for oil and gas companies, and all innovations in this space will be closely monitored. Exciting times.
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