Innovation activity in the oil and gas industry: conference summary

The first conference on innovative developments in the oil and gas industry initiated by MC Sberinvest took place on June 5, 2013 at Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas.

The event was organized as a platform to discuss custom innovations for oil and gas corporations.

Despite the fact that the conference on the topic took place for the first time, it brought together representatives of all innovation infrastructure objects: target customers, industry scientists, development institutions, venture capitalists, business accelerators, as well as media representatives.

The conference was organized by the non-profit partnership on innovations development in the fuel and energy complex State University of Oil and Gas.

Mikhail Silin, the Director of NP State University of Oil and Gas, opened the conference and spoke about the work of Technological Platform the Technologies of Hydrocarbons Production and Use managed by NP State University of Oil and Gas.

According to him, the Technology Platform (TP) includes more than 200 participants: oil and gas companies, all leading oil and gas universities and universities of related industries, research and development organizations, engineering centers. The main objective of the TP is to create a communication platform for science, business and government.

One of the TP’s main management forms is the creation of working groups with the participation or under supervision of the RF Ministry of Energy on the most important areas of the oil and gas industry.

The Ministry of Energy established a working group on Developing a Programme to Improve Oil Recovery on the TP’s initiative. There is an Interdisciplinary Working Group on Industrial Data (IWG NSI-4D) created under NP State University of Oil and Gas.

Currently, working groups are being established in the following areas: professional standards, standardization in the oil and gas industry. It also assumes the creation of consortia in the following areas: learning materials on the Bazhenov Formation and best available technologies and practices.

The next part of the conference included statements of major oil corporation representatives with a presentation of innovation development programmes.

The Head of Engineering and Petroleum Engineering of GPN STC Gazprom Neft Ruslan Kaydyshev shared the company’s key technological directions.

He said that improving efficiency of current assets development would reduce the rate of the base yield decline by 10% and increase the production growth of well interventions by 30%. The involvement of 500M tons of low-productivity reserves in cost-effective development will provide a cost-effective oil production at new fields.

Nikolay Veremko, the head of Lukoil-Engineering told the media about Lukoil Company’s directions of innovative development: The oil recovery factor (ORF) and the share of oil production in the RF regions of the oil extraction in 2010 has high rates in Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug: actual recovery factor is 53, 6% of projected, with a water cut of 86.8%.

The conference ended with a speech by Oleg Dyachenko, MC Sberinvest’s Board Member (a leading player in the Russian VC market) and the General Director of Kortik-Service, LLC (a business accelerator of small innovative projects).

Dyachenko told about basic principles for the creation of innovative companies to the needs of oil and gas corporations. He noted that the mechanism to support innovative projects that involve industry corporations, development institutions and technology platforms became more or less stable over the past two years. However, innovators often have no objective information about the needs of major industrial enterprises and options to use grant money, venture capital investment and target programs in the development of their projects.

Scientists are also not always able to carry out comprehensive management and give marketing support to their projects, which is necessary for successful commercialization of any innovation project. In this context, the strategy of custom innovations, when an innovative product or technology is developed for a particular customer, is the least risky and guarantees innovative company stable sales.

Oleg Dyachenko mentioned MC Sberinvest’s funding priorities for projects in the gas and oil sector: precision spindle multiphase flow meters including submersible ones (the ability to measure flow rates of individual sections of the well); digital laboratories for the study of core samples; drilling of horizontal wells with large and extra-large vertical deviation; multiple interval standardized hydraulic fracturing in horizontal wells and related technologies; APG utilization; information technologies Upstream; shelf deposits development technologies, etc.

At the end of the workshop, the organizers confirmed their intention to carry out such activities on a regular basis to track the results of finished projects, search for emerging needs and developments to them, as well as to set new challenges for developers.