1. For Francisco Ortigosa, Director of Geophysics for Madrid-
based Repsol, being transferred to Houston—arguably the
“capital” of the oil industry—was an important milestone,
akin, he jokes, to an actor going to Hollywood. It was 2001,
and Ortigosa, whose previous stints included time in Egypt,
Colombia, Venezuela and Russia, had embarked on an
important mission. His company had resolved to expand its
operations into the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil. One important
aspect of his job was to observe what the crowded field of
competitors in the gulf was doing right and to take away
lessons that Repsol could apply in its own operations.
In the ensuing years, one clear lesson came across was that
imitation—being a follower—was a path to be avoided. Such was the consensus
of the multidisciplinary task force that Ortigosa led comprised of experts from
Repsol’s research, production and other key business areas. The discussion
came to a head in a particularly decisive meeting, held in Houston in 2005,
where Ortigosa laid out a simple, but compelling calculus. “We realized that every
incremental step we took would be matched by our competitors. As late entrants
into the Gulf of Mexico, that means we stay behind our competitors,” Ortigosa
explains. “Our breakthrough was the realization that we needed to take two steps
for their every one and ‘leapfrog’ the competition.”
Looking For Tomorrow’s Growth
Repsol’s decision to expand from its primary, land-based properties (in North Africa and South
America) into the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Brazil reflected its need to replenish declining reserves.
To find substantial new reserves—in an era when all the “easy oil” has been discovered—Repsol
recognized that its best options lay far offshore, in fields that were not only deeper but also more
Repsol:
Discovering the
Benefits of Smarter Oil
and Gas Exploration
Let’s Build a Smarter Planet
Smarter Planet
Leadership Series
Leadership
Spotlight
Spearheaded by Francisco
Ortigosa, Director of Geophys-
ics, Repsol has embarked on
a groundbreaking strategy that
employs highperformance
computing (HPC) like no other
energy company had before
it. Repsol is achieving deeper
insights on drilling risks and
opportunities, while gain-
ing the agility to act on them
faster than competitors.
How Repsol Got Smarter
Optimizing the most advanced
seismic algorithms for its new
HPC solution enabled Repsol
to run them in one-sixth
the time. The resulting edge
in both increased seismic
mapping accuracy and shorter
time-to-action has made it not
only more agile competitor but
also better at measuring the risks
of deep water drilling. Its 50%
success rate is well above the
industry average of 20%. This
case study examines Repsol’s
calculated gambit—and how it’s
paying off.
2. un Express
Salt Well
1,250 ft.
300 ft.
30,000 ft.
1250
feet
30,000 feet
300
feet
geologically complex. What all of its drilling options had in common was the
prevalence of salt domes, mushroom-shaped layers below the ocean floor
left behind by the evaporating of ancient seas.
While salt domes provided the perfect structure for trapping large oil
deposits, they also exemplify the trade-off between opportunity and risk that
characterizes major oil finds in the post-easy-oil era. In addition to the inherent
challenges of deep water exploration, finding deposits below the salt layer
is made more difficult by its crystalline structure, which adds a great deal of
“noise” to seismic imaging data. Getting the kind of detailed picture of sub-salt
conditions that lessens the risk (and $150 million cost) of drilling a dry hole
requires oil companies to run powerful imaging algorithms—requiring lots of
high-performance computing resources—to filter out this noise. The fact that
few oil companies had successfully tapped sub-salt deposits attests to the
difficulty of meeting this challenge.
Jumping Ahead In Exploration
That’s where the need to leapfrog comes in. Repsol’s leadership realized that as
a relatively small player in a field of global energy giants, the company needed
a competitive edge, to develop capabilities that other oil and gas companies
didn’t have. In the Gulf of Mexico, that required edge was speed—the ability
to process complex seismic imaging data faster than competitors, thus giving
Repsol the accurate and detailed information it needed to secure reserves
earlier than its competitors. Off Brazil, Repsol was ahead of other oil majors in
Sub Salt Well
attempting sub-salt drilling, the main challenge was to find and map deep sea drilling opportunities
with a level of detail that had not been possible before. This would require new models and a
quantum increase in the power of Repsol’s seismic algorithms.
In his 20 years with Repsol, Ortigosa’s role has always been centered on finding and evaluating
opportunity below the ground. He believes, however, that along the way, the subtleties of how
he executes this role have evolved—with the sub-salt project a powerful case in point. “My job
is to be a spark that provides a trigger for inspiration among a diverse group of perspectives so
that we can synthesize their best ideas into an effective strategy,” says Ortigosa. This role as an
The Benefits of Repsol’s
Smarter Drilling
• Increase in drilling success
rate to 50%, compared to
industry average of 20%,
through improved ability to
quantify drilling risks
• The savings from only one
avoided “dry” well ($150
million) are equivalent to eight
times the money spent to
develop Project Kaleidoscope.
• 85% reduction in time
required advanced reverse time
migration seismic algorithms
• Faster time to market for
new oil and gas properties by
shortening the seismic data
analysis phase
• Reduced risk in bidding for
offshore oil and gas leases
In under 30 years,global
energy consumption will
increase by 50%
2007
2035
3. orchestrator of solutions was essential as his team sought to pull together the elements of a winning
strategy. Most evident was the need for a new level of computing power to enable the speed and
imaging insights that would give Repsol competitive edge it needed to succeed.
Epiphany From Barcelona
The project’s turning point came when Repsol was approached by parallel processing experts from
the Spanish-government-owned Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), who outlined the benefits
of optimizing Repsol’s reverse time migration (RTM) algorithms to run on IBM’s Cell Processor,
an architecture first developed to run graphics-intensive video games. The BSC team specifically
pointed out how the PowerXCell 8i’s multicore processing architecture was especially well-suited to
RTM’s specialized processing demands, and how IBM Research—through its expertise in optimizing
algorithms to run on the Cell platform—could help maximize their performance. This meeting of the
minds was the genesis of an initiative that came to be known within Repsol as Project Kaleidoscope.
Leadership is:
Orchestrating a
Diverse Set of Inputs
In his 20 years in geophysics
with Repsol, Francisco
Ortigosa’s role has always
been centered on finding and
evaluating opportunity below
the ground. The sub-salt
project highlighted how his job
has evolved along the way,
with Ortigosa acting as a
“sparkplug” to spur problem
solving among a diverse group
of problem solvers.
Lessons Learned:
The importance of
Seeking a Diversity
of Opinion
“We realized that for a project
like Kaleidoscope, which was
aiming for a clear shift in our
exploration model, we needed
out-of-the-box thinking in every
dimension. Looking back, we
see the diversity of our team—
with people on both sides of
the Atlantic—as a major reason
for project’s success.”
The vision embodied by Project Kaleidoscope constituted a fundamental change in Repsol’s
exploration strategy, one that elevated the role of high-performance computing to top-tier strategic
importance. Adopting it required the team to sell the business case to the company’s senior
management as well as the Board of Directors. With the business case laid out before them—driven
by lower risk, improved drilling success rates and a strong prospect of finding the long-term reserves
Repsol needed—management was excited. Nonetheless, there was a clear recognition among senior
management of the underlying risks of going head-to-head with established competitors, especially
in the Gulf of Mexico. But in the end, the company saw the prospect of success as significantly
outweighing these risks.
Success Through Diversity
One important reason for Repsol’s confidence was the depth and breadth of support the company
would rely on through key strategic partners. In addition to BSC and IBM, Repsol would also leverage
the resources of Stanford University’s Stanford Exploration Project (SEP), an academic consortium
focused on creating more advanced 3-D and 4-D seismic models. In lining up institutional resources
for Project Kaleidoscope, Ortigosa was following a clearly defined strategy—that is, to maximize
the diversity of perspectives in order to provide the richest and most groundbreaking set of ideas.
“Advancing seismic imaging to the next level of precision poses a multi-disciplinary challenge,
demanding the best minds from industry, government and academia,” explains Ortigosa. “We realized
4. that for a project like Kaleidoscope, which was aiming for a clear shift in our exploration model,
we needed out-of-the-box thinking in every dimension. Looking back, we see the diversity of our
team—with people on both sides of the Atlantic—as a major reason for project’s success.”
Today, Repsol’s strategic vision is realized in the Project Kaleidoscope’s high performance computing
infrastructure, located in Houston and running on a cluster of 288 IBM BladeCenter QS22 blade
servers and supported by a large network of IBM TotalStorage storage hardware. After experts from
BSC and IBM worked to optimize Repsol’s complex seismic algorithms for the IBM PowerXCell 8i
processors at core of the solution, the Project Kaleidoscope infrastructure can run these algorithms
six times faster than Repsol’s previous computing platform, reducing a cycle that once took four
months to roughly two weeks.
Insights Yield Payoffs
What Repsol has effectively done is to radically shift—if not break—the trade-off between the
accuracy of seismic imaging and the all important variable of speed. Now Repsol has both. This has
provided exactly the competitive edge its planners conceived, an edge that has yielded measurable
benefits. Perhaps the most telltale metric is to 50 percent success rate Repsol achieved in the most
recent year (considerably higher than the industry average) which signifies the company’s ability
to understand and manage drilling risks better than competitors. This enables Repsol to not only
avoid the time and capital lost on dry wells, but also to more accurately gauge and more effectively
capitalize on major of discoveries. This impact was seen in Repsol’s decision to purchase a major
stake in the deepwater Shenzi field in the Gulf of Mexico, now one of the world’s largest offshore oil-
producing areas. The fact that Repsol was able to map the Shenzi field before any other companies
gave it valuable insights that it was able to take advantage of and position it favorably for future
development.
As mentioned above, the powerful business case Ortigosa and his team presented to Repsol’s
senior management was an important factor in the company’s decision to go ahead with Project
Kaleidoscope. But it wasn’t the only factor. During the time Ortigosa and his team were assembling
the business case, Repsol was also experiencing major personnel changes at the top. This included
the appointment of Antonio Brufau as Executive Chairman, who was known to be open to embracing
technology. Ortigosa explains: “Given the direction we wanted to take, we saw the change in
mindset—the openness to new ways of doing business—as an ideal situation.”
The Parameters of Repsol’s
Smarter Drilling
Instrumented
Seismic sensing data captured
by Repsol is run through powerful
algorithms that have optimized
for maximum performance.
Interconnected
Project Kaleidoscope’s high-
performance computing cluster
delivers a six-fold increase in
processing throughput over the
previous platform.
Intelligent
By rendering complex subsurface
structures such as salt domes
in greater detail, Repsol can
substantially curb drilling risk,
resulting in fewer dry holes and
lost opportunities.
