Low-carbon development, research of the continental shelf and core: prospects for the development of cooperation between Rosneft and Innopraktika

At the XXVI SPIEF, several important cooperation agreements for the oil and gas industry were signed between Rosneft and the non-governmental development institute Innopraktika. The documents relate to both scientific development and ecology, and exploration of the bowels of our country.

Thus, in Russia it is planned to create maps of geological objects potentially suitable for environmentally stable storage of CO2. These will include coal and salt seams, aquifers, igneous rocks, and depleted oil and gas reservoirs. The discovery of such places is necessary for the implementation of solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the mining and processing complex of the company. In addition to Rosneft and Innopraktika, specialists from the Faculty of Geology of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov, as well as experts from other leading scientific centers of the Russian Federation.

It should be noted that Rosneft was the first in the Russian oil and gas industry to set itself the goal of achieving net carbon neutrality by 2050 and included it in its Rosneft-2030 strategy.

In addition, the company and the development institute, together with JSC Rosgeo, will carry out research work to study the Russian continental shelf. The documents provide for the drilling of shallow stratigraphic wells in the East Siberian Sea. The work will be carried out from the domestic engineering drilling vessel “Bavenit”, owned by JSC “Rosgeologia”, equipped for the tasks of the expedition with the latest domestic equipment.

The purpose of the scientific expedition is to collect a core, a valuable stone material that serves as a direct source of geological information necessary to determine the age (stratification), composition and formation conditions of the rocks of the Eastern Arctic shelf and predict the state of the oil and gas systems of the region. Complex laboratory, analytical and cameral studies will be carried out by Innopraktika on the basis of the Faculty of Geology of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov.

The development of digital technologies for the study of the resulting core will also receive a new round of development. The company and the development institute plan to expand the functionality of the RN-Digital Core corporate software package.

Recall that RN-Digital Core was created by LLC Tyumen Oil Research Center (part of the research and design block of Rosneft) together with Innopraktika. The software has no analogues in Russia and in the world in terms of a number of algorithms used and the purpose of software modules. Mathematical modeling of core properties makes it possible to obtain data for predicting the hydrocarbon content in the reservoir, building its hydrodynamic model and selecting the most effective methods for developing enhanced oil recovery.

The updated version of the RN-Digital Core complex will allow simultaneously modeling the joint flow of oil, gas and water in the core and directly calculating one of the most important properties of the rock – the permeability of the three-phase system. It is practically impossible to obtain such a result under the conditions of a physical experiment with a core.