Digitalization of processes at oil and gas industry enterprises in the Arctic may increase the probability of discovering new fields by 50%, said Alexey Fadeev, professor of the Higher School of Industrial Management at St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.
"Digitalization, in addition to the main task of reducing risks to humans in production, can greatly increase the economic attractiveness of Arctic oil and gas projects. The full implementation of just the digital solutions available today will increase the probability of discovering new deposits by 50 percent," the professor said.
According to him, digitalization of Arctic projects will also increase their competitiveness and investment attractiveness for international partners.
The need for digitalization of Arctic projects is many times higher than those implemented in other regions of Russia, due to extreme climatic conditions, the remoteness of the shelf from the coastline, the need for increased security and speed of decision-making.
"The development of deposits requires science and industry to create a number of fundamentally new technical means, and the development technologies are comparable in complexity to space exploration technologies and nanotechnology," Fadeev said.
Unmanned aerial and underwater offshore drones, robotic drilling rigs, and unmanned warehouses are actively used in the oil and gas industry today.
There are already 40 "intelligent" fields operating in Russia, accounting for 27 percent of the total production volume, TASS notes.
Alex Shishlo for Rough&Polished
