Huawei Oil & Gas Virtual Summit 2020 was successfully hosted online. The summit gathered global customers, industry partners, industry pioneers, and thought leaders under the theme of ‘Data to Barrel.’
Digitalization representatives from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Schlumberger SIS, and the former Chief Information Officer (CIO) of French giant TOTAL had attended the summit and shared their experiences of helping oil and gas companies to increase profits while cutting costs, creating added value through digital transformation. Essential suggestions on how the industry can overcome challenges during the current crisis, adapting to the new normal of the pandemic, and post-pandemic periods were also fully explored.
In the first half of 2020, due to the global economic downturn amid the spread of COVID-19, international oil prices fell to a low of $30 per barrel. In May, a historically unprecedented event took place in the oil industry when West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures prices turned negative. Undoubtedly, the oil and gas industry has entered a challenging period and is witnessing changes, the likes of which have not been seen for over a century.
Huawei has been working hard to help oil and gas customers to cope with these current challenges. David Sun, Vice President of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group and Director of the Global Energy Business Department, commented, “Over the past decade, Huawei has partnered with customers in the oil and gas industry, and together they have witnessed the fluctuation of oil prices from the peak of $120 per barrel to the lowest value of $30 per barrel. Along the way, Huawei’s role has changed — and upgraded — with the support and help of oil and gas companies. Evolving from a vendor that simply provided switches, routers, and network devices, to becoming a full partner dedicated to providing digital transformation solutions, Huawei works with partners and customers alike to jointly promote the application of 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and big data in the oil and gas industry. It continues to explore new technologies and applications, where solutions to the current challenges lie.”
Working with partners, Huawei planned and built a computing AI platform for an industry customer, to implement AI training and big data analytics. This has, in turn, led to an increase in both oil and gas reserves and production. Indeed, solutions have been implemented in various scenarios, including artificial-lift fault diagnosis, well-logging, and reservoir identification, and seismic first arrival wave identification, extracting significant value from underutilized — formerly ‘useless’ — data.
Huawei built a dedicated oil and gas exploration cloud. The cloud data center improves computing power by eight times. It has similarly improved pre-stack seismic data processing capability by five times, from 400 square kilometers to 2000 square kilometers, matching work area requirements. Elsewhere, AI and big data capabilities have been used to re-analyze 10 PB of the customer’s historical exploration data, to mine new value from it, and to support extraction decision-making, bringing substantial additional value to the oilfield.
Huawei is empowering a wide range of industries through 5G networking. In the oil and gas industry, 5G technologies are changing the operation modes of seismic data collection. Huawei has put 5G network features to work — including high bandwidth, extensive connectivity, and low latency — to help achieve high-speed backhaul of seismic data, reducing the manual cabling workload and significantly improving the efficiency of seismic data collection.
Elsewhere, Huawei 5G networks are already being used in oilfields and stations to support robot inspection, drone inspection, and Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) applications.
Additionally, the Huawei Horizon Digital Platform helps oil and gas customers break down legacy siloed service systems and quickly release service applications as micro-services, to meet the complex and changing needs of the industry. For example, Huawei has deployed an enterprise cloud for SONATRACH, the national state-owned oil company of Algeria. The cloud-based solution manages and coordinates multiple data centers, eliminates resource silos, and dramatically improves overall operational efficiency.
Such innovative ICT technologies — AI, cloud, edge computing, and 5G — will reshape the oil and gas industry. As David Sun concluded at the Huawei Oil & Gas Virtual Summit 2020, “According to IDC’s latest survey, Chinese industrial users see Huawei as the digital transformation leader, ranking number one. In the future, we hope to share Huawei’s digital transformation capabilities and experiences in China’s oil and gas industry with global customers to help achieve even greater business success.”
