St Petersburg University Students Help Gazprom Neft Improve Drilling Efficiency
This past summer, a new joint project between Saint Petersburg University and the Gazprom Neft Science and Technology Center (STC), a digital modelling laboratory, opened its doors. Recently students and graduates of St Petersburg University, along with the laboratory’s co-director on the part of the STC, Maksim Mityaev, reflected on their participation in the project.
The laboratory was set up to train cross-disciplinary specialists who will be able to analyze and integrate data from different fields.
Anyone who works in the laboratory needs not only to be well-versed in geology, seismology and petrophysics but also to understand the basic principles of related disciplines, such as the drilling, development, installation and economics of oil fields.
Maksim Mityaev, co-director of the laboratory
The laboratory staff are integrated into the workings of the entire Science and Technology Center and are engaged in solving problems in two key focal areas: production projects on the one hand, and research and development on the other. “The work on production projects involves challenges that we are already quite familiar with and know how to solve. But in the second area, things are developing in a completely different way,” the laboratory’s co-director explained. “Here there are challenges that we are just beginning to work on at the STC. The top priorities are prescribed in the center’s strategic technology plan, and they are the development of unconventional reserves, the refinement of enhanced recovery methods, the technologies of geological exploration and other advanced fields. Working on such projects, we know exactly what results we would like to achieve and are searching for and developing new, more effective technologies.”
Leysan Muzafarova, a graduate of St Petersburg University, is engaged in one of these strategic objectives. The purpose of her research is to classify oil deposits and reservoirs according to a limited amount of initial data.
We calculate the corrections that need to be introduced into the parameters of a reservoir – porosity, oil saturation and others – so that already during the first stages of prospecting and exploration we have an idea of the reserves and the uncertainties in the finite model.
St Petersburg University graduate Leysan Muzafarova
Insaf Khisamutdinov, a second-year master’s student at St Petersburg University, is involved in a more applied problem. He is constructing a model of productive reservoirs at a particular oil field in western Siberia. “While working on such problems, it immediately becomes clear why we study what we do at the university. It’s really useful to start working on real-world projects as part of our master’s program,” the graduate student pointed out. “This makes it possible to bring everything we have learned during out studies into clear focus and with everything in the right place.”
In future, the project directors also plan to involve students who are in a joint academic program of St Petersburg University and the STC, Geological Support of Developing Hydrocarbon Reserves, in the work of the laboratory. “It is important that the program itself give a strong theoretical foundation and that the problems that students work on solving at the STC become a part of their graduation thesis at the university,” Mityaev noted. “This was, after all, the original idea behind the creation of the laboratory.”