Drill with Shell

February 23rd, I became the proud owner of a wonderful punch. From my heart I drilled everything that should have been drilled at home so long ago, I began to think: “What else to dive up ...” Familiar?

But this is a healthy human desire for destruction - exactly what they are trying to avoid when it comes to oil production. Before installing a drilling rig in virgin taiga, filled with life of a jungle or fragile tundra, each oil producer conducts thorough geological exploration. But there are still no ways to establish the location of underground hydrocarbon reserves with 100% accuracy. The result: millions spent on correcting mistakes in the field, extra harm to the environment, gasoline prices on your favorite gas station.

That is why the oil and gas giant Shell decided to work with HP to develop the most sensitive seismic survey system. The new HP touch technology should raise the quality of the earth's interior maps to a new level.

“It’s much more difficult to get a high-quality image of underground tanks, unlike tanks under the seabed,” says Wim Walk, Shell’s head of geophysical measurements, “The commercial systems we have do not give us a clear idea of ​​where to go. we are drilling oil and gas wells. ”
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The principle of operation of the system based on HP microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS) is very simple. Its main element is an intelligent network of thousands of microscopic accelerometers. For seismic exploration tasks, such a network is developed over an area of ​​approximately 1,600 km². The network picks up sound waves sent by geologists and reflected from the boundaries of underground reservoirs. It has long been a familiar technology, but with a radically higher accuracy - 1,000 times more than the existing analogues today.


Peter Hartwell, a leading researcher at HP Laboratories, is holding a prototype accelerometer with an integrated HP MEMS sensor.

Each sensor is equipped with an accelerometer itself, a solar battery and a radio transmitter, which allows it to communicate with its counterparts and the central computer in real time. It is very unpretentious and withstands difficult climatic conditions. Petabyte data streams received from the sensor network will be processed on supercomputers, which will also be supplied by HP.

What remains to be worked out is: a communication standard for sensors that satisfies the laws on the use of radio, and an intermediate link between the sensor network and the Shell data center. It should have a huge capacity and bandwidth, while at the same time reliably protecting data from being intercepted by competitors.

“Shell traditionally did not make such systems by itself. Instead, she used third-party seismic monitoring solutions. But now we really want to become leaders and create a super-duper system for high-quality seismic data, ”Wim Vok concludes.

This is how the innovative technology announced by HP just 4 months ago and being the sister of printhead production technology in printers can soon help open new oil fields and significantly increase the efficiency and safety of production on the already known ones. Therefore, the date when it will end may have to be postponed.