Oilfield services company Schlumberger said it has formed a partnership with supermajor Chevron and technology giant Microsoft to accelerate creation of innovative petrotechnical and digital technologies. The firms say they will work together to accelerate development of cloud-native solutions and deliver actionable data insights for the industry.
Data is quickly emerging as one of the most valuable assets to any company, yet extracting insights from it is often difficult as information gets trapped in internal silos, Schlumberger said. As part of the collaboration, the three companies will work together to build Azure-native applications in the DELFI cognitive E&P environment initially for Chevron, which will enable companies to process, visualize, interpret and ultimately obtain meaningful insights from multiple data sources.
DELFI is a secure, scalable and open cloud-based environment providing seamless E&P software technology across exploration, development, production and midstream. Chevron and Schlumberger will combine their expertise and resources to accelerate the deployment of DELFI solutions in Azure, with support and guidance from Microsoft. The parties will ensure the software developments meet the latest standards in terms of security, performance, release management, and are compatible with the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Data Platform. Building on this open foundation will amplify the capabilities of Chevron’s petrotechnical experts.
The collaboration will be completed in three phases starting with the deployment of the Petrotechnical Suite in the DELFI environment, followed by the development of cloud-native applications on Azure, and the co-innovation of a suite of cognitive computing native capabilities across the E&P value chain tailored to Chevron’s objectives.
Olivier Le Peuch, chief executive officer, Schlumberger, said, “Combining the expertise of these three global enterprises creates vastly improved and digitally enabled petrotechnical workflows. Never before has our industry seen a collaboration of this kind, and of this scale. Working together will accelerate faster innovation with better results, marking the beginning of a new era in our industry that will enable us to elevate performance across our industry’s value chain.”
“There is an enormous opportunity to bring the latest cloud and AI technology to the energy sector and accelerate the industry’s digital transformation,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Our partnership with Schlumberger and Chevron delivers on this promise, applying the power of Azure to unlock new AI-driven insights that will help address some of the industry’s—the world’s—most important energy challenges, including sustainability.”
Joseph C. Geagea, executive vice president, technology, projects and services, Chevron, said, “We believe this industry-first advancement will dramatically accelerate the speed with which we can analyze data to generate new exploration opportunities and bring prospects to development more quickly and with more certainty. It will pull vast quantities of information into a single source amplifying our use of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing built on an open data ecosystem.”