Chinese cloud computing company Alibaba has signed a new agreement with the Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi for research aimed at maximising the value of Abu Dhabi’s oil assets.

It is understood that the new deal won by Alibaba Cloud is an extension of the previous collaboration it had with Khalifa University’s Masdar Institute to use its cloud computing portfolio in Masdar’s research to help Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) achieve its target of attaining an oil recovery rate of 70 per cent from its oilfields.

Although the new partnership is also focussed on training and improving the skills of local students and workers in domains such as Big Data, Internet-of-Things, robotics and cloud computing, the prime purpose remains finding ways to implement these technical concepts to achieve optimum oil recovery rates in Abu Dhabi’s oilfields, a source has told MEED.

Quantum mechanical simulation techniques can be used to understand and predict the movement of liquids across the surface of solid crystalline structures, and when this capability is applied to oil reservoirs, the knowledge gained can be leveraged to enhance oil production. Previously geological analysis of the reservoir could only be done till the centimetre or millimetre levels at best, but with Alibaba's cloud, the Masdar Institute has been able to study rock formations to the nanometre level, according to Dan Hu, general manager of YVOLV, a joint venture company between Alibaba Cloud and Dubai-based Meraas Holding.

“Improving efficiency is very important for all oil and gas companies. The standard industry recovery rate is 40 to 50 per cent. A lot of oil remains at the rock surface level. There is a certain force between the liquid or oil and the rocks. The team at Khalifa University wanted to understand the relation between the oil and the rocks, and how to extract that oil to improve efficiency,” Hu said of the earlier collaboration between Alibaba and Khalifa University.

The research team at Khalifa University adopted Alibaba Cloud’s computing technology and built the simulation model on Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) service (each GPU instance having thousands of stream processors) to expand its computing capability, reduce simulation time and increase prediction accuracy.

Hu also told MEED that Alibaba Cloud is considering proposals it has received from institutions in Saudi Arabia and other regional countries for similar oil recovery projects. “Low oil recovery rate is an issue for the entire Middle Eastern oil and gas industry. We want to help companies maximise recovery in other countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman or even China,” he said at an event to mark one year of operations of Alibaba’s Dubai data centre.