Gazprom Neft to create pilot domestic industrial digital production platform

The “Digital Plant” initiative forms part of a Gazprom Neft project to create Russia’s first holistic digital platform for the production, distribution and sales of oil products. Work in this area has been ongoing at the company since 2017, and envisages the involvement of leading companies in the Russian IT market — of which Zyfra is one.

The Digital Plant pilot project will be established within the company’s Gazpromneft Bitumen Materials subsidiary: the objective of transformation here being to introduce digital monitoring systems for production and quality control.

The core IT framework is expected to be in place by the end of 2018, as well as AI systems monitoring the movements of raw and other materials, together with advanced software packages to optimise economic and material accounting for the enterprise’s balance sheet. Once digitised process data is in place the project will move on to its second phase — developing a system of “digital twins” of production infrastructure facilities, monitoring reliability and process parameters in operating equipment.

On the photo (from left to right): Anatoly Cherner, Deputy CEO for Logistics, Processing and Sales, Gazprom Neft and Igor Bogachev, CEO, Zyfra at this year’s St Petersburg International Economic Forum

This digital platform will integrate, store and process data, providing Gazprom Neft specialists with visualisations of changes in key production parameters. The system will be integrated into the company’s wider IT architecture for logistics, processing and sales, in the longer term.

The implementation of the agreement will be driven by the Gazprom Neft Digital Innovations Centre, established by the company to identify and implement technological solutions in Big Data, predictive management, and creating “digital twins” in production infrastructure.

Anatoly Cherner, Deputy CEO for Logistics, Processing and Sales, Gazprom Neft, commented: “Gazprom Neft continues to strengthen its market leadership in operational efficiency, with recent years having seen us implement dozens of digital projects. Developing an IT platform to manage industrial production is a further step forward in our company’s development. Partnering with Zyfra in creating practical industrial solutions and developing AI technologies opens up new opportunities for improving our business efficiency.”

Igor Bogachev, CEO, Zyfra, added: “We see the development of applied functional solutions — a library of ‘artificial intelligence’ in enterprise management — as both extremely promising and important, and something which could, in future, be available commercially to other companies in the oil and gas industry, and others.”

Gazprom Neft is a vertically integrated oil company, primarily involved in oil and gas exploration and production, refining, and the production and sale of oil products. The Gazprom Neft’s corporate structure comprises more than 70 production, refining and sales subsidiaries throughout Russia, the CIS, and abroad.

The company’s proved and probable reserves (SPE-PRMS) are estimated at 2.78 billion tonnes of oil equivalent (btoe), making Gazprom Neft one of the top-20 largest oil and gas companies in the world, and one of Russia’s top three largest companies in terms of production and refining volumes. Total production in 2017 reached 89.75 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe), with refining volumes of 40.1 million tonnes.

Gazprom Neft products are exported to more than 50 countries worldwide, and sold throughout the Russian Federation and abroad. The company’s filling station network totals more than 1,850 outlets throughout Russia, the CIS and Europe.

ZYFRA is an international company, established in 2017. Zyfra develops products, invests in technology, and is developing an environment based around the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIOT) and artificial intelligence (AI) for industry, healthcare and retail networks. The company focusses on creating ready-made industry solutions in predictive analytics and data analysis, and in monitoring industrial equipment, personnel and technological processes for industrial enterprises in the petrochemical, oil refining, oil and gas, metallurgy, machine building and other industries. In 2018, ZYFRA created its own technological platform for the deployment and operation of its “Digital Advisor” systems in the metallurgy, petrochemicals, and chemicals industries.