Schlumberger, Chevron and Microsoft to transform energy sector

By Elly Yates-Roberts on 17 September 2019

Microsoft has partnered with oil and gas technology provider Schlumberger and energy company Chevron to accelerate the energy sector’s digital transformation. The firms will build Microsoft Azure-based applications in Schlumberger’s DELFI cognitive exploration and production (E&P) environment for Chevron, enabling the company to better analyse data and obtain meaningful insights from multiple sources.

“Combining the expertise of these three global enterprises creates vastly improved and digitally enabled petrotechnical workflows,” said Olivier Le Peuch, chief executive officer at Schlumberger. “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.”

DELFI is a cloud-based environment which provides E&P software technology throughout the petrotechnical production process, from discovery through to merchandising. Chevron and Schlumberger will combine their expertise and resources to drive 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 security, performance and release management, and are compatible with the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Data Platform.

“There is an enormous opportunity to bring the latest cloud and artificial intelligence (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 and the world’s most important energy challenges, including sustainability.”

The collaboration will consist of 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.

“We believe this industry-first advancement will dramatically accelerate the speed with which we can analyse data to generate new exploration opportunities and bring prospects to development more quickly and with more certainty,” said Joseph Geagea, executive vice president of technology, projects and services at Chevron. “It will pull vast quantities of information into a single source amplifying our use of AI and high-performance computing built on an open data ecosystem.”