IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Sichuan Geophysical Company of Petroleum Administration Bureau (SCGC), one of the largest oil and gas seismic exploration and engineering service providers in China, has adopted IBM PureSystems. The PureFlex solution will allow SCGC to analyze seven times more seismic data than before, enabling the exploration of larger oil and gas fields, while reducing the environmental footprint.

SCGC, part of a Chuanqing Drilling Engineering Limited and a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), provides engineering and technical services to the international oil and gas industry in China, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Ecuador. Its services span a broad range of areas including: engineering and geological research; geophysical survey; drilling engineering; down hole services; mud logging, well logging and perforating; oil and gas field engineering construction and development; and oil/gas field cooperative development. In 2012 CNPC, one of the world's largest exploration companies, produced 110 million metric tons, up 2.79 million metric tons from a year earlier. According to a research institute affiliated with China National Petroleum Corp., China's oil demand in 2013 is expected to rise to 514 million metric tons, up 4.8 percent over last year.

"Today many of the systems and processes associated the oil and gas industry are not efficient enough to be sustainable. For example, an oil field exploration can generate one terabyte of data daily, and a petroleum engineer may devote up to 70 percent or more of his or her time mining this data," says Deng Yali, Deputy Chief Engineer, SCGC. "In order to increase our seismic imaging capabilities, reduce the risk of drilling "dry holes" and leverage our vast geographical region faster, we need to analyze at least seven times more data and do that much faster than before."

To help meet this goal and implement the new IT infrastructure, SCGC worked with IBM and Sichuan Zhonglu Technology & Trader Co., Ltd. The solution runs the CAD/CAE professional software on IBM Flex System x240, PureFlex p750, Flex System Chassis and uses IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) - a high-performance storage enterprise file management platform. The new smarter computing infrastructure can integrate seismic and geologic data from multiple sources and use advanced data modeling.

As a result, SCGC can now be more precise in locating remote resources thus avoiding "dry hole" drilling. A data analysis cycle now takes approximately a week - a process that took 27 days to complete before. Analytics, optimization and virtualization techniques can render larger amounts of complex data in more intuitive ways, allowing engineers to improve their decision making and, ultimately, their production effectiveness. These new capabilities can help increase the utilization of the existing gas and oil fields. Given the enormous price tag of drilling a new well and the complexity of managing production facilities, even modest increases in oil exploration and production efficiency could tremendously improve energy affordability.

"The oil and gas companies in the future will rely not only on natural resources, but also on their ability to develop a clear focus on building adaptive business models and deploying strategic technologies," said Dominic Tong, Vice President, Systems & Technology Group, IBM Greater China Group.  "The IBM PureSystems solution we delivered to Sichuan Geophysical Company of Petroleum Administration Bureau enables a new level of analytical insight that fits with client's need for cost effectiveness, sustainability and faster time-to-market."