Refined precise exploration helps rejuvenate Daqing oilfield

The discovery of Daqing Oilfield in 1959 coincided with the 10^th anniversary of the founding of the country, and marked a significant milestone for the country's development. It helped China shed its reputation as an "oil-poor" nation, and the oilfield was subsequently named Daqing, which means "Great Celebration."

The oilfield's development was difficult, as China's petroleum industry had to be built from the ground up, but it is also a tale of daring innovation. Over the last 65 years, Daqing Oilfield has taken a unique approach to technological innovation: "Applying one generation of technology, while researching the next, and reserving the last." By simultaneously focusing on three generations of oil extraction technology, they have produced more than 10 million tons of oil over the last 21 years, making it one of the highest-producing single refineries in the world. Today, Daqing Oilfield focuses on what it calls "post-reservoir and unconventional oil" resources, which present a number of technological challenges.

After much research, Daqing Oilfield has determined that precise and refined exploration will be the answer to increasing reserve. It also decided to dig deeper into already developed oilfields to maximize output.

Oil and gas exploration can be compared to a CT scan of the ground. The more precise data is collected and processed, the more accurate an understanding operator get of the ground's geological structure. This increases the possibility of finding oil.

Oil and gas exploration involve a large amount of data and a long processing chain. Over time, however, the oil reservoir exploration system of Daqing Oilfield has become outdated, with computing tasks often taking several days. Moreover, new data center construction is traditionally quite costly, requiring high initial investment into resources that will be underutilized and consume vast amounts of energy. In fact, the electricity costs alone for running the center for four years can equal to the cost of the IT equipment. The company needed new storage and computing resources if it hoped to achieve more precise exploration.

Daqing Oilfield chose to lease high-performance computing resources from Huawei Cloud to meet these demands instead of building its own data center. Under this model, Daqing Oilfield established a high-speed cloud data center core network with 400G bandwidth by deploying almost 700 advanced servers, storage systems, and network devices. This has given them access to 833% more overall computing power, which can allow them to complete from 120 trillion floating calculations per second to 1000 trillion floating calculations per second (equals to 1PFLOPS). Huawei Cloud's high-performance computing cluster can efficiently run international mainstream seismic processing software, which has reduced Daqing's business launch time from 30 months to 5. Daqing Oilfield's operation and maintenance demands have also been reduced, thanks to the unified operation and maintenance and synchronous upgrade capabilities that come with Huawei Cloud.

One Daqing Oilfield manager explained that their previous computing cluster only had the computing and storage capabilities needed to complete small-scale pre-stack time migration processing. In complex faulted oil and gas target areas, the cluster simply could not support more advanced algorithmic processing methods. The new high-performance computing cluster and massive storage system provided by Huawei Cloud allows for pre-stack depth migration processing of layers up to eight kilometers deep. The processing area for pre-stack seismic data can also be expanded to 2000 square kilometers, thanks to the 500% increase in capability.

This new deep exploration is helping Daqing Oilfield revitalize old oilfields to increase and stabilize production. Production at many of their oldest wells had started to slow after 50 years of exploration. However, reduced production does not necessarily mean that there are no oil reserves left. By leveraging Huawei Cloud and AI technology, Daqing Oilfield has quickly built a cognitive computing platform to extract more value from massive amounts of "silent" and "useless" data. This allows them to take a more scientific approach to developing adjustment plans and implementing measures to explore the potential of old wells.

Daqing Oilfield now uses a cognitive computing platform to predict the output and water content indicators of three typical blocks. They have also established an indicator prediction model for medium- and high-permeability rare oil sandstone reservoirs. The prediction reaches over 90% precision, which is about 10% higher than standard prediction methods, making the management of oil well production more dynamic and single well measure decision-making more efficient. Together, these solutions help oilfields increase storage and production, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.

The oil industry is currently undergoing a major transformation thanks to digitization. Oil and gas exploration just happens to be the industry's testing ground for many of these emerging technologies. The application of intelligent technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and AI to oil and gas exploration will undoubtedly help bring us one step closer to a new era for this traditional industry.