Schlumberger launches Ocean for Academic Program

June 8, 2009
Schlumberger has launched its Ocean for Academia Program, signing collaboration contracts with Rice, Stanford, Texas A&M, and Unicamp universities to develop new technology on the Ocean open software platform.

Offshore staff

AMSTERDAM -- Schlumberger has launched its Ocean for Academia Program, signing collaboration contracts with Rice, Stanford, Texas A&M, and Unicamp universities to develop new technology on the Ocean open software platform.

The universities will employ Ocean for a number of initial applications. The resulting
Ocean plug-ins will augment Petrel seismic-to-simulation workflows in specific research and development (R&D) areas relevant to upstream oil and gas. The program will expand to include additional universities in the coming months, the company says.

Stanford University's initial research will focus on applying ensemble theory to geological model screening, enhancing the general purpose reservoir simulator capabilities and subsalt seismic attribute extraction.

Texas A&M’s first project is a new approach to reconciling geologic models to historical production data. Schlumberger will field test the resulting plug-in on a project in Asia.

Unicamp’s first R&D efforts will center on strategic reservoir management incorporating uncertainty, linking the value of information to reservoir engineering and economics, for long-term asset management decisions.

Research and development efforts at Rice University will focus on development of plug-ins for borehole geology integration with geologic modeling as well as integration of historical seismic data.

“Successfully collaborating with universities is critical to the future of the oil and gas industry,” says Meyer Bengio, VP of technology for Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS). “The Ocean for Academia program establishes a collaborative innovation network leveraging the Ocean platform to achieve greater efficiency in bringing research from concept to market. This network includes academia, oil companies and independent software providers.”

06/08/2009