Rosneft Is Teaching Computers to Design Oil Fields
Building a well pad for oil wells typically means driving heavy piles with specialized equipment, a process that can take several months. Engineers at Rosneft's Ufa Design Institute, working with RN-Yuganskneftegaz, have proposed replacing them with lightweight, rapidly deployable supports.
The mobile well pad can be assembled two to three times faster and costs about 6% less. Once the wells have reached the end of their productive life, the pad can be dismantled and moved to a new location, while digital technologies can help design it.
“Lego” for the Oil Field
The advantage of this approach lies in standardized modules that can be easily assembled on site, much like a construction set. If production needs to expand, new modules can be added without interrupting operations. This allows engineers to create configurations tailored to specific geological and technical conditions without sacrificing standardization, while allowing each configuration to be reused multiple times. RN-Yuganskneftegaz expects the approach to generate an economic benefit of 4.6 billion rubles (about $55 million) by 2028.
Notably, Rosneft's Ufa Design Institute already has an extensive digital catalog of 3D models for standard oil-production infrastructure components, including pipes, supports and equipment. This digital “construction set” contains more than 150,000 static and 250,000 dynamic 3D models. It is essentially a huge Lego catalog inside a computer: engineers do not have to spend time designing standard components because those components already exist.
In the near term, the company plans to develop software capable of analyzing initial parameters, including the number of wells, load requirements and location, and then automatically assembling a complete 3D model of the well pad from these digital “building blocks.” Engineers would no longer have to draw every facility from scratch, significantly speeding up both design and construction.
Hundreds of Projects and Thousands of Digital Twins
Rosneft has already used information modeling technologies in field development. Engineers, for example, created a model of an Orenburgneft oil pumping station covering 100 hectares (247 acres) from more than 96,000 3D objects. RN-BashNIPIneft, another Rosneft research institute, has completed more than 100 information modeling projects over 15 years. One of the largest is a digital twin of the gas treatment unit at the Barsukovskoye field, covering 270,000 cubic meters, a volume comparable to a small town. The virtual replica includes more than 90 pieces of equipment.
Today, 80% of Rosneft's new geological models are built using RN-GEOSIM. The software suite is continuously being improved. The new version 3.0 automatically builds models with minimal user involvement, accelerating model construction by 15%. Eliminating third-party software saves the company more than 700 million rubles (about $8.4 million) a year.
The Result Is in the Computer, Not on Paper
Gazprom Neft is also using advanced technologies to increase oil production and improve its efficiency. The company is developing GeoNavigator. The system builds a geological model of the productive formation as drilling progresses and automatically adjusts the well trajectory to keep it within the target formation.
At LUKOIL, integrated field models now cover more than a quarter of its total production. These technologies are already delivering results: at the V. Filanovsky field, they helped bring the asset to design capacity within two years by allowing well-related decisions to be adjusted in real time. Longer term, the company expects around 80% of its hydrocarbons to be produced from intelligent fields.
In the past, a design engineer worked with drawings while a process engineer worked with calculation tables. Now everyone works from the same 3D model. That makes it possible to simulate different equipment operating scenarios, such as asking “what happens if the pressure is increased?”, without putting the actual field at risk. The field is first “built” inside a computer, where engineering decisions can be tested before they are implemented in the real world.
A Digital Twin for the Entire Industry
In 2025, Russian oil and gas companies increased their annual spending on digitalization by 20%, reaching 162 billion rubles (about $1.94 billion). Every major producer is creating and developing its own engineering model. But soon, Russia's entire oil and gas industry could have a digital twin of its own.
“It is important that these models can be synchronized so that we can integrate them in the future. This would allow us to tackle the task of building a digital twin of the industry within a relatively short period of time,” said Gazprom Neft CEO Alexander Dyukov.
In the future, the digital model is expected to evolve fully from an engineer's tool into a co-designer of projects. Oil and gas engineering in Russia is moving from manual drafting toward automated assembly.
