Repsol leverages digital intelligence

The development of exploration technology has advanced significantly over the past few years. There are many benefits, which it brings, including helping energy companies to minimise exploration risk when searching for new resources and increase the productivity of their oil and gas fields.

Repsol leverages digital intelligence

For many years, Repsol, an integrated global energy company, which is based in Madrid, has been at the forefront of developing exploration technology. The Repsol Technology Center is the heart of the company’s research and development activities. Opened in 2002, the Center is a leading European research facility, which promotes strategic projects aimed at fulfilling current and future energy needs by creating more efficient and environmentally sustainable energy systems.

Processing large sets of data is one of the areas in which Repsol is becoming increasingly active as the successful implementation of data mining and analytics protocols, conducted by advanced technology, can improve the evaluation of exploration projects, speed up the decision making process and therefore reduce exploration costs.

One of those technologies is the Sherlock Project, which was launched in 2009 at the Repsol Technology Center and is a result of collaboration between the Center and the Upstream Executive Managing Division's Group of Geological Exploration Disciplines. Sherlock is a multidisciplinary project that pools expertise in geology, geochemicals and high-resolution chemical analysis and aims to improve exploration success rate and reduce uncertainty through geological evaluation, validation and calibration of hydrocarbon reservoirs.

By taking different samples of rock cores received from various geographic locations, Repsol scientists and researchers strive to learn everything possible from the samples and determine, when, how and where the oil was formed in order to understand certain migration patterns.