Southwest Oil & Gas Field Unveils Earth's Resources with Cloud-based Exploration and Robust Computing Power

China's technological prowess is shifting from quantity to quality, moving from isolated breakthroughs to stronger systems. It is actively seizing the technological high ground in various fields like deep sea, deep Earth, deep space, and deep blue (i.e. information technology). In the deep Earth field, oil and gas exploration stands out as an area where results can be quickly achieved, leading to early industrial implementation.

As the exploration of the deep Earth progresses, the complexity of oil and gas exploration increases. Seismic data collection, processing, and interpretation generate vast amounts of information. Effective use of cloud and high-performance computing, as well as artificial intelligence and other technologies, is crucial. It helps in improving the efficiency and accuracy of exploration and development, reducing exploration timelines, increasing well success rates, and lowering exploration and production (E&P) risks.

Southwest Oil and Gas Field company, a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation, (Southwest Oil & Gas Field company for short) is the leading natural gas producer in Southwest China. It operates across 90% of the exploration area in the Sichuan Basin and has produced over 700 billion cubic meters of natural gas. With a strategic focus on "sourcing from the depths of the Earth", Southwest Oil and Gas Field company, in collaboration with Huawei Cloud Stack, established a unified computing center, a data lake, and a general-purpose technical platform in Southwest China. They also developed three collaborative application scenarios. These scenarios cover: oil and gas E&P engineering, control over natural gas production processes, and integrated natural gas production, transportation, storage, and sales. Huawei Cloud Stack provided graphic computing and storage resource pools to support the digital transformation and intelligent development of the entire business chain, from production to transportation, storage, and sales. This empowered oil and gas exploration, development, production, pipeline transportation, storage, and precision marketing.

Cloud-based exploration: Harnessing digital intelligence for accurate reservoir exploration

Oil and gas exploration involve handling a large amount of geological and seismic data, as well as multidimensional data analysis such as seismic pre-stack and post-stack data analysis, and well logging data. Traditional manual data processing methods perform poorly in terms of efficiency and accuracy, especially when dealing with complex terrains. The intelligent solution can accurately, quickly, and intelligently process data, significantly improving exploration efficiency.

The data infrastructure of the Southwest Oil & Gas Field has been operational for over five years, with some devices in service for a decade. The equipment suffers from weak configurations and poor performance, resulting in high failure rates. Devices are deployed in a decentralized architecture with primarily manual O&M operations, lacking a unified IT & O&M management platform. These limitations have led to inefficient computing resource utilization. Therefore, it is imperative to build a shared computing center to improve it.

Huawei's E&P Computing Center Solution provides computing resources for specialized applications, like reservoir fine numerical simulation and atmospheric pollution simulation, for the company. Leveraging a full-stack cloud HPC architecture, 100GE lossless network, and multi-workspace continuous processing, reservoir exploration becomes more accurate.

Advantage 1: Fast construction

The unified computing center uses "lease instead of construction", which allows for a shorter construction period compared to traditional methods. This approach can better meet the computing requirements of the data lake and collaborative research platform for E&P in Southwest China.

Advantage 2: Lease instead of construction, lower one-off cost

By adopting a cloud-based HPC construction approach, the traditional physical server deployment model is transformed. The cluster software can flexibly allocate resources, quickly adjust physical machine resources, and automatically deploy resources based on user requirements. In addition, IP addresses and clusters do not need to be manually configured.

Through collaborative exploration and practice, the data silos in production operations have been broken. A unified data platform is built for the company, resolving the collaboration challenges between scientific research and production, and enabling large-scale data computation and data sharing. Support is provided for comprehensive online research in areas including exploration, production, engineering, reserves, and mining rights, greatly accelerating the pace of oil and gas E&P business.

Centralized deployment of specialized software, improving the speed of oil and gas discovery

Southwest Oil and Gas Field company has 132 professional research and production software applications. These software tools are deployed across the Exploration Research Institute, Natural Gas Research Institute, Shale Gas Research Institute, Gas Production Engineering Institute, and each gas field's geological group. The company deployed a shared cloud management platform and computing resource pool within its unified computing center, enabling centralized resource management and on-demand configuration. The solution successfully met the cloud deployment requirements for seismic processing and interpretation applications. It enabled unified deployment of vendor software in the cloud, along with centralized data management and sharing. These improvements directly increased well exploration success rates, and shortened oil and gas discovery timelines.

Elastic scaling, disaster recovery and backup: Ensuring secure and stable running of the computing resource platform

In the early stage of the computing center's design, the company along with Huawei considered resource utilization efficiency and data security. The computing center provided on-demand, scalable, high-performance, and high-capacity computing resources to support the company's daily O&M systems (cloud-based/non-cloud-based). In addition, it offered local data backup services for the company's cloud-based systems, supported mainstream operating systems, and provided file-level data recovery capabilities.

Foundation models are penetrating various industries. In the future, the Southwest Oil and Gas Field company will also incorporate AI capabilities into its production processes. It will continue to work with Huawei to explore oil and gas models and further improve oil and gas production efficiency. Using the IT system featuring cloud-edge-device synergy, many intelligent applications will be developed for the entire oil and gas and energy industry chains. With the help of the computing center, the company can accelerate the intelligent transformation of the industry and usher in a new era of oil and gas production. With the cloud as a medium, we can go deeper into the Earth.