CyberTEK Advances: A Dispatch From Gazprom Neft’s Digital Future
Gazprom Neft has turned its entire operating chain – from geological exploration to gas stations – into a digital “universe”ecosystem, covering 80% of its processes with digital twins.
Not long ago, changing the operating mode of an oil well required sending crews into the tundra, exposing equipment and personnel to harsh conditions. That is no longer necessary. Gazprom Neft has digitized nearly all of its production processes. At the recent Tsifrovaya industriya promyshlennoy Rossii (Digital Industry of Industrial Russia, TsIPR) conference, company CEO Alexander Dyukov explained to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin: “If we look at the entire value chain – from geological exploration to petroleum product sales – 80% of it is now covered by digital twins.”
The Control Room of the Future
Gazprom Neft’s team demonstrated its digital twins to the prime minister and other visitors at the exhibition, showing every stage of the process – subsurface exploration driven by algorithms, production systems where digital wells effectively “sense” the reservoir, as well as refining and logistics operations.
The company has officially announced a transition to an agent-based operating model. Previously, a digital twin functioned more like a “smart thermometer” that simply reported conditions. Now it is evolving into an active operational manager. AI agents will search for optimal decisions in real time. The system resembles a control room where decisions are made within milliseconds after evaluating thousands of scenarios. Those agents are already beginning to operate as interconnected systems that effectively “negotiate” with one another. A “field twin” tells a “refinery twin” how much feedstock will be supplied, while the refinery system selects the optimal crude processing mode.
Deploying these technologies reduces the risks of industrial accidents and environmental disasters by orders of magnitude. The company is learning not to react to past failures, but to manage future scenarios proactively. If the project continues to scale, Russia could eventually gain a unified “CyberTEK” platform capable of managing the country’s entire energy sector.
Geologists No Longer Guess
Gazprom Neft has undergone a full-scale technological evolution. In 2022, the company won the Smart Oil & Gas competition in the category “Best Solution Using Digital Models and Predictive Analytics.” It developed a digital twin for seismic exploration that has since been used at more than 800 sites. Geologists stopped relying on intuition when deciding where to drill and began trusting data-driven modeling instead.
In 2024, Russia’s Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Finance began evaluating the use of digital twins for tax regulation. The idea was to tailor fiscal conditions to each field individually through its digital model. That marked the moment when digital twins evolved from engineering tools into regulatory instruments.
A year later, the CyberTEK initiative emerged. Alexander Dyukov publicly announced a goal of creating a full digital twin of Russia’s entire oil industry by 2050. The CyberTEK project has effectively been embedded into the country’s updated Energy Strategy. At the same time, the Ministry of Digital Development began working with major companies to establish unified industry data standards.
More recently, Gazprom Neft reported the creation of digital twins for the cryolithozone – a permafrost forecasting system deployed in Yamal. The platform combines data from 3,500 engineering wells with satellite imagery. The digital model can now predict where the ground may subside, helping prevent losses worth billions of rubles. Notably, Kazakhstan’s leading oil and gas company, KazMunayGas, has begun deploying similar digital twins. Those technologies are already being used at fields containing 90% of the country’s reserves. The trend is expanding beyond Russia.
One Day Instead of Twenty
The efficiency gains delivered by these technologies are difficult to overstate. A digital twin of the resource base can improve project profitability by 20%. A digital twin for construction operations reduces drilling time by 25% – saving substantial amounts of steel and fuel. The time savings are equally significant. Updating a production program previously required 20 days. Now the process takes just one day. Operational responsiveness is increasing exponentially.
Russia is moving beyond “digital showcase” projects toward AI-driven operational management. The coming years will likely unfold under the banner of CyberTEK – a unified cloud environment and common standards for the entire energy sector. If that vision materializes, Russia could model how the economy would react to falling oil prices, new taxes, or climate disasters before those events actually occur.
