MURMANSK, February 20. /TASS/. Digital technologies at enterprises implementing oil and gas projects in the Arctic will increase the probability of discovering new fields by 50%, and will also build up the competitiveness and investment attractiveness of Russian projects for international partners, Alexey Fadeev, Doctor of Economics, Professor of the Higher School of Industrial Management at the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, told TASS.

"Digitalization, in addition to its main task to cut risks to humans in production processes, can greatly build up the economic attractiveness of Arctic oil and gas projects. The implementation of just currently available digital solutions may increase the probability of discovering new fields by 50%, and in drilling and mining, for example, it may reduce costs by $20 billion per year, which will significantly increase the competitiveness of Russian projects in the Arctic," the expert said.

The oil and gas industry is using actively unmanned aerial and underwater offshore drones, robotic drilling rigs, and automated warehouses, he continued. "We know already 40 so-called intellectual deposits operating in the Russian Federation. They produce 27% of the total volume. Many energy corporations have been digitalizing their activities: digital twins, geological decisions are made based on digital interpretations of received data, and much more."

The importance of digital approaches to Arctic projects is many times higher than in projects implemented in other Russian regions due to the extreme climate conditions, because the shelves are distanced from the coastline, and because the projects require increased security and speed of decision-making. "The oil and gas complex is no longer technologically simple. The development of deposits requires science and industry to create quite many fundamentally new technical means, and development technologies are comparable in complexity to space exploration and nanotechnology," he concluded.