High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Oil and Gas Industry
Companies in the oil and gas sector are leveraging HPC solutions to process, analyze, and visualize data as energy exploration becomes increasingly challenging. This trend is expected to grow in the coming years.
Mature fields currently account for over 70 percent of the world’s oil and gas production. Many of these fields are in the secondary or tertiary phases of production. Therefore, innovative discovery and extraction techniques are needed to extend production from these fields.
This is where HPC plays a significant role in the oil and gas sector. Companies are seeking to leverage fields they currently lease and the horizontal wells shafts that are already drilled today. To maximize extraction from existing fields, energy companies in the oil and gas sector are adopting techniques that leverage HPC servers and workstations to capture, process, and analyze the massive amount of data produced by seismic surveys and modeling/simulation efforts.
The challenges for HPC are unique and extreme for energy exploration due to the value of information. Billions of dollars are at stake. For example, processing tasks must fit within the timeline of a lease term of prospective well sites. In addition, delays in the analysis can be costly due to the high operating costs of idle equipment and personnel at existing sites.
Detailed, seismic surveys that are captured by thousands of sensors in an array allow companies to increase their fracking efficiency and also improve the unconventional drilling methods currently used. The conversion of these detailed surveys into actionable insights is critical, as there is an urgent need to make good decisions about where and how to drill. HPC solutions are used ubiquitously in the energy sector, as geosciences are expected to be among the fastest-growing sectors of HPC in the coming years.
The energy sector, along with the financial sector, is a leading consumer of powerful, high-performance servers, workstations, and other supercomputing resources in the commercial space. Indeed, companies in the oil and gas sector maintain one of the highest overall rates of internal software usage, producing and maintaining more in-house applications and algorithms than any other commercial sector. Furthermore, there is no end in sight to this trend. As emerging techniques are developed to produce imagery of subsurface structures at ever higher fidelity, energy companies are adopting more effective and computing intensive approaches, such as Kirchhoff migration, wave-equation migration, reverse-time migration, and full-wavefield inversion. Future techniques include elastic migration and viscoelastic migration to account for even more fidelity of earth modeling to account for additional terms that come into play as waves propagate through the subsurface structure.
The energy sector, along with the financial sector, is a leading consumer of powerful, high-performance servers, workstations, and other supercomputing resources in the commercial space. Indeed, companies in the oil and gas sector maintain one of the highest overall rates of internal software usage, producing and maintaining more in-house applications and algorithms than any other commercial sector. Furthermore, there is no end in sight to this trend. As emerging techniques are developed to produce imagery of subsurface structures at ever higher fidelity, energy companies are adopting more effective and computing intensive approaches, such as Kirchhoff migration, wave-equation migration, reverse-time migration, and full-wavefield inversion. Future techniques include elastic migration and viscoelastic migration to account for even more fidelity of earth modeling to account for additional terms that come into play as waves propagate through the subsurface structure.