OGR July - August Edition 2020

Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, and 5G Reshaping the
Oil and Gas Industry
Huawei organised an Oil & Gas Virtual
Summit 2020, exploring 'Data to Barrel'.
The summit gathered together global
customers, industry partners, and thought
leaders — including representatives from the
Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC),
Schlumberger SIS, and the former Chief
Information Officer (CIO) of French giant
TOTAL — to share their experiences of helping
oil and gas companies increase profits while
cutting costs, creating added value through
digital transformation. Key suggestions on how
the industry can overcome challenges at this
particular point in time, adapting to the new
normal of the pandemic and post-pandemic
periods, were also fully explored.
As the oil and gas industry faces upheaval,
Huawei is well positioned to help. In the first
half of 2020, due to the global economic
downturn amid the spread of COVID-19,
international oil prices fell to a low of 30 dollars
per barrel. In May, West Texas Intermediate
(WTI) crude oil futures prices even turned
negative, a historically unprecedented event.
Undoubtedly, the oil and gas industry has
entered an extremely difficult period and is
witnessing changes, the likes of which have not
been seen for over a century.
Huawei has been working hard to help oil and
gas customers cope with these current
challenges. David Sun, Vice President of
Huawei's Enterprise Business Group and
Director of the Global Energy Business
Department, noted that, over the past decade,
Huawei has partnered with customers in the oil
and gas industry and together witnessed oil
prices peak at 120 dollars per barrel, as well as
fall to that low of 30 dollars. Along the way,
Huawei's role has changed — and upgraded —
with the support and help of oil and gas
companies. Evolving from a vendor that simply
provided switches, routers, and network
devices, to becoming a full partner dedicated to
providing digital transformation solutions,
Huawei works with partners and customers
alike to jointly promote the application of 5G,
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and big data in the oil
and gas industry. It continues to explore new
technologies and applications, where solutions
to the current challenges lie.
Indeed, using elastic computing, big data
analytics, AI, and cloud data centers, Huawei
has already helped oil and gas customers
achieve digital transformation, promoting the
construction of intelligent oilfields and
increasing oil and gas reserves.
Working with partners, Huawei planned and
built a computing AI platform for an industry
customer, to implement AI training and big data
analytics. This has, in turn, led to an increase in
both oil and gas reserves and in production.
Indeed, solutions have been implemented in
various scenarios, including artificial-lift fault
diagnosis, well-logging and reservoir
identification, and seismic first arrival wave
identification, extracting significant value from
underutilized — formerly 'useless' — data.
In the words of Dr. Mohamed Akoum from
ADNOC: In an era of change for industries
around the world, ADNOC continues to drive
innovation and embed advanced technologies
across its value chain to optimize performance,
boost profitability and build resilience.
New ICT Technologies Reshape the Oil and Gas
Industry: Huawei Offers a Wealth of Experience
Today, 150 years after the first successful
extraction of oil from a drilled well, accessible
underground oil resources have been all but
exhausted. Oil companies, by necessity, are
therefore now exploring deep-water, pre-salt,
and unconventional reservoirs.
At 60 years old, Daqing Oilfield — the largest
oilfield in China, situated in Heilongjiang, the
country's northernmost province — has faced
enormous challenges in terms of reserve
replacement, stable production pressure, cost
reductions, and efficiency improvements.
At the Huawei Oil & Gas Virtual Summit 2020,
Zhang Tiegang, former Deputy Chief Engineer
of the Exploration and Development Research
Institute at Daqing Oilfield, explained that
seismic exploration technologies to detect oil
and gas reserves have been the method of
choice for most oil companies.
Increasing seismic exploration while decreasing
well drilling, he noted, has become a new
measure widely used in the industry. However,
high precision and massive data processing have
brought their own challenges to seismic
exploration and oilfield exploration and
development. With a single seismic exploration
work area now expanded to over 2000 square
kilometers, the volume of data collected
through the broadband, wide-azimuth, and
high-density seismic data collection technology
has exceeded 1 TB per square kilometer.
To help Daqing Oilfield address these issues,
Huawei built a dedicated oil and gas exploration
COVID-19 NEWS
cloud. The cloud data center improves
computing power by eight times and has
similarly improved prestack seismic data
processing capability by five times, from 400
square kilometers to 2000 square kilometers,
matching work area requirements. Elsewhere,
AI and big data capabilities have been used to reanalyze
10 PB of the customer's historical
exploration data, to mine new value from it and
support extraction decision-making, bringing
huge additional value to the oilfield.
Huawei is empowering a wide range of
industries through 5G networking. In the oil and
gas industry, 5G technologies are changing the
operation modes of seismic data collection.
Huawei has put 5G network features to work —
including high bandwidth, wide connectivity,
and low latency — to help achieve high-speed
backhaul of seismic data, reducing the manual
cabling workload and significantly improving the
efficiency of seismic data collection.
Elsewhere, Huawei 5G networks are already
being used in oilfields and stations to support
robot inspection, drone inspection, and
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
applications.
Additionally, the Huawei Horizon Digital
Platform helps oil and gas customers break
down legacy siloed service systems and quickly
release service applications as micro-services, to
meet the complex and changing needs of the
industry. For example, Huawei has deployed an
enterprise cloud for SONATRACH, the national
state-owned oil company of Algeria. The cloudbased
solution manages and coordinates
multiple data centers, eliminates resource silos,
and greatly improves overall operation
efficiency.
As a global ICT solutions provider, Huawei is
committed to bringing digital to every oil and gas
company. At the Huawei Oil & Gas Virtual
Summit 2020, Wang Hao, Chief Technology
Officer (CTO) of the Oil & Gas Development
Department for Huawei's Enterprise Business
Group, said that Huawei will use ICT as a new
engine to work even more closely with industry
customers in challenging times. Indeed, Huawei
is already working with 19 of the top 30 oil and
gas companies, in 45 countries and regions
around the world, helping them achieve digital
transformation. Ultimately, this will bring more
benefits to the upstream, more security to the
midstream, and more value to the downstream.
Such innovative ICT technologies — AI, cloud,
edge computing, and 5G — will reshape the oil
and gas industry. As David Sun concluded at the
Huawei Oil & Gas Virtual Summit 2020:
"According to IDC's latest survey, Chinese
industrial users see Huawei as the digital
transformation leader, ranking number one. In
the future, we hope to share Huawei's digital
transformation capabilities and experiences in
China's oil and gas industry with global
customers, to help achieve ever greater
business success.
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OIL AND GAS REPUBLIC I SPECIAL EDITION