What digital products are needed by Russian oil and gas companies, taking into account the changing international situation, energy transition and other trends in the industry?

- The first significant step towards the start of import substitution in the field of software for the oil and gas industry was made in 2014 after the first sectoral sanctions from the United States and the EU. Significant funding was allocated within the framework of federal target programs of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation for scientific work on the development of prototypes of the computational core of simulators, as well as the cost of developing their own software was included in the innovative development programs of domestic oil and gas companies.

By the time of the significant tightening of sanctions in 2022, against the background of the growing complexity of the international geopolitical situation, it can be said that the Russian oil and gas sector was already prepared. By that time, import substitution had been actively carried out for 8 years and a line of individual software samples for the design of oilfield services and field development planning had been created. In this sense, the imposition of sanctions did not cause such a strong shock as in other industries. In particular, it is worth mentioning simulators for the design of hydraulic fracturing technology: "RN-GRID" (created in the internal corporate structure of the innovative development of PJSC NK Rosneft) and "CyberGRP" (created by a consortium of scientific organizations, including MIPT and Skoltech, with an industrial partner of PJSC Gazprom Neft), the MUFITS simulator for geological storage of CO2 in underground formations (Research Institute of Mechanics of Moscow State University) and a number of others. At the same time, there is still no full–fledged platform solution in the Russian Federation that would allow the joint use of separate (standalone) simulators in a single cycle of field development, where the initial geological data is fed to the drilling simulator, the obtained well trajectories are fed to the hydraulic fracturing simulator, the created crack geometry is to the simulator of commissioning and long–term production and so on (as an example of such a platform, let's mention Petrel from the international oilfield services company Schlumberger).

Taking into account a certain pressure on the value of the selling price of crude oil, the work on increasing efficiency and reducing the cost of oilfield services becomes the highest priority. Under these conditions, technological leadership is shifting from service companies to operating companies, which, with the development of design tools, take on a leading role in choosing designs, while technical execution remains for service companies. This, of course, does not apply to expensive and special operations (complex wells with extended horizontal sections).

If we talk about the priorities for further development, taking into account the global energy transition, the share of oil in our country's energy balance will gradually decrease and the share of gas (including from the gas condensate Achimov deposits) will increase, which means that digital solutions for gas projects will come to the fore. In terms of the introduction of artificial intelligence methods, the key problem remains the quality and availability of field data on which models could be trained. The most important step towards the introduction of AI methods in the oil and gas industry should be the development of an internal corporate infrastructure for the collection, digitization, validation, storage and subsequent analysis of field data from oil and gas fields.