Top Oil&Gas students of Northern Eurasia
As the first stage of PetroCup World Student Olympics 2022 (PWSO 2022) comes to a close, it’s time to recap the top highlights of students from the Northern Eurasia.
On April 20-21, over 100 students united in Kazan, Russia to compete in synthetic field development. Over 200 students joined the tournament from 22 universities in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The tournament was based on an interactive simulator - PetroCup, which allows to go through a multi–year cycle of oil and gas production in a matter of days, starting from field development and well drilling all the way to production analysis and virtual asset sales. The team from Almetyevsk State Petroleum Institute won first place, followed by students from Kazan Federal University in second place, and Samara State Technical University in third place.
The results of each team were evaluated using a wide range of parameters and criteria, ranging from how well the team performed well management and surveillance all the way to assessing the economic efficiency of each activity.
According to Nafta College principal Dr. Artur Aslanyan, PetroCup is an integrated Russian hardware and software training suite that has no equivalent in the world. It is a highly developed interactive simulator with elements of artificial intelligence. Such assistants will play a vital role in the future education and will help Oil&Gas students to speed up their professional growth.
The event organizers are given an important task to assist petroleum universities in training future specialists to meet the current market challenges and demands. Andrey Bochkov, Deputy General Director of the GazpromNeft STC noted that the majority of training programs today are far from meeting the actual needs. To achieve those needs, operating companies along with universities are working to enhance technological development through effective means, currently there is high trend of using innovative machine learning tools within university curriculum.
The practical cases that we find in PetroCup scenarios illustrate exactly what operating companies are facing at the moment.
"Our team has previously participated in PetroCup many times, and even being experts with lengthy experience, the stereotypes that we had crumbled," said Azat Lutfullin, Deputy Head of the Department of Field Development of PJSC Tatneft, during PWSO 2022. – The strategies that we used to apply in our work sometimes turned out to be wrong. And it's phenomenal that there is an opportunity to have a virtual practical training so that we can make the right judgement at the real fields."
During the two-day tournament, the participants attended many of the available live demos on field development and participated in the industry-specific quizzes.
PWSO has been held since 2018. According to Igor Shpurov, General Director of the State Commission on Mineral Reserves, in five years the simulator has advanced to the level when it can be used for professional education.
Later in the fall of this year, the winning team of Northern Eurasia League will compete with universities from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa for the N.N.Neprimerov Award, the main prise of the tournament. Andri Syafriya, Deputy General Director for Field Development at PetroChina Indonesia, gave a speech during the Northern Eurasia tournament encouraging and inspiring students to compete in this event.
The event was organized with the support of the Russian Federation's Ministry of Education and Science, the Republic of Tatarstan's Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and the Russian Federation's Ministry of Natural Resources.
More information about the event is available on PWSO official page: https://nafta.college/petrocup/projects/student-olympics/
