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.

1. Smarter Planet
Leadership Series
Repsol:
Discovering the
Benefits of Smarter Oil
and Gas Exploration
For Francisco Ortigosa, Director of Geophysics for Madrid- Leadership
based Repsol, being transferred to Houston—arguably the
“capital” of the oil industry—was an important milestone,
Spotlight
Spearheaded by Francisco
akin, he jokes, to an actor going to Hollywood. It was 2001, Ortigosa, Director of Geophys-
and Ortigosa, whose previous stints included time in Egypt, ics, Repsol has embarked on
a groundbreaking strategy that
Colombia, Venezuela and Russia, had embarked on an employs highperformance
important mission. His company had resolved to expand its computing (HPC) like no other
energy company had before
operations into the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil. One important it. Repsol is achieving deeper
aspect of his job was to observe what the crowded field of insights on drilling risks and
opportunities, while gain-
competitors in the gulf was doing right and to take away ing the agility to act on them
lessons that Repsol could apply in its own operations. faster than competitors.
How Repsol Got Smarter
In the ensuing years, one clear lesson came across was that Optimizing the most advanced
imitation—being a follower—was a path to be avoided. Such was the consensus seismic algorithms for its new
HPC solution enabled Repsol
of the multidisciplinary task force that Ortigosa led comprised of experts from to run them in one-sixth
Repsol’s research, production and other key business areas. The discussion the time. The resulting edge
in both increased seismic
came to a head in a particularly decisive meeting, held in Houston in 2005, mapping accuracy and shorter
where Ortigosa laid out a simple, but compelling calculus. “We realized that every time-to-action has made it not
only more agile competitor but
incremental step we took would be matched by our competitors. As late entrants also better at measuring the risks
into the Gulf of Mexico, that means we stay behind our competitors,” Ortigosa of deep water drilling. Its 50%
success rate is well above the
explains. “Our breakthrough was the realization that we needed to take two steps industry average of 20%. This
for their every one and ‘leapfrog’ the competition.” case study examines Repsol’s
calculated gambit—and how it’s
paying off.
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 Let’s Build a Smarter Planet

2. geologically complex. What all of its drilling options had in common was the
Sub Salt Well
un Express 300 prevalence of salt domes, mushroom-shaped layers below the ocean floor
Salt Well feet
300 ft. left behind by the evaporating of ancient seas.
While salt domes provided the perfect structure for trapping large oil
1,250 ft.
1250 deposits, they also exemplify the trade-off between opportunity and risk that
feet
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 The Benefits of Repsol’s
“noise” to seismic imaging data. Getting the kind of detailed picture of sub-salt Smarter Drilling
conditions that lessens the risk (and $150 million cost) of drilling a dry hole • Increase in drilling success
rate to 50%, compared to
requires oil companies to run powerful imaging algorithms—requiring lots of industry average of 20%,
high-performance computing resources—to filter out this noise. The fact that through improved ability to
quantify drilling risks
few oil companies had successfully tapped sub-salt deposits attests to the
• The savings from only one
difficulty of meeting this challenge. avoided “dry” well ($150
million) are equivalent to eight
Jumping Ahead In Exploration times the money spent to
develop Project Kaleidoscope.
That’s where the need to leapfrog comes in. Repsol’s leadership realized that as • 85% reduction in time
30,000 ft.
a relatively small player in a field of global energy giants, the company needed required advanced reverse time
migration seismic algorithms
a competitive edge, to develop capabilities that other oil and gas companies • Faster time to market for
didn’t have. In the Gulf of Mexico, that required edge was speed—the ability new oil and gas properties by
to process complex seismic imaging data faster than competitors, thus giving shortening the seismic data
analysis phase
Repsol the accurate and detailed information it needed to secure reserves • Reduced risk in bidding for
30,000 feet
earlier than its competitors. Off Brazil, Repsol was ahead of other oil majors in offshore oil and gas leases
attempting sub-salt drilling, the main challenge was to find and map deep sea drilling opportunities 2035
with a level of detail that had not been possible before. This would require new models and a 2007
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
In under 30 years, global
is to be a spark that provides a trigger for inspiration among a diverse group of perspectives so energy consumption will
that we can synthesize their best ideas into an effective strategy,” says Ortigosa. This role as an increase by 50%

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. Leadership is:
Orchestrating a
Epiphany From Barcelona Diverse Set of Inputs
In his 20 years in geophysics
The project’s turning point came when Repsol was approached by parallel processing experts from with Repsol, Francisco
the Spanish-government-owned Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), who outlined the benefits Ortigosa’s role has always
been centered on finding and
of optimizing Repsol’s reverse time migration (RTM) algorithms to run on IBM’s Cell Processor, evaluating opportunity below
an architecture first developed to run graphics-intensive video games. The BSC team specifically the ground. The sub-salt
project highlighted how his job
pointed out how the PowerXCell 8i’s multicore processing architecture was especially well-suited to has evolved along the way,
RTM’s specialized processing demands, and how IBM Research—through its expertise in optimizing with Ortigosa acting as a
“sparkplug” to spur problem
algorithms to run on the Cell platform—could help maximize their performance. This meeting of the solving among a diverse group
minds was the genesis of an initiative that came to be known within Repsol as Project Kaleidoscope. of problem solvers.
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 Lessons Learned:
management as well as the Board of Directors. With the business case laid out before them—driven The importance of
Seeking a Diversity
by lower risk, improved drilling success rates and a strong prospect of finding the long-term reserves of Opinion
Repsol needed—management was excited. Nonetheless, there was a clear recognition among senior “We realized that for a project
management of the underlying risks of going head-to-head with established competitors, especially like Kaleidoscope, which was
aiming for a clear shift in our
in the Gulf of Mexico. But in the end, the company saw the prospect of success as significantly exploration model, we needed
outweighing these risks. out-of-the-box thinking in every
dimension. Looking back, we
Success Through Diversity see the diversity of our team—
with people on both sides of
the Atlantic—as a major reason
One important reason for Repsol’s confidence was the depth and breadth of support the company for project’s success.”
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 The Parameters of Repsol’s
Smarter Drilling
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 Instrumented
Seismic sensing data captured
provided exactly the competitive edge its planners conceived, an edge that has yielded measurable by Repsol is run through powerful
benefits. Perhaps the most telltale metric is to 50 percent success rate Repsol achieved in the most algorithms that have optimized
for maximum performance.
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 Interconnected
Project Kaleidoscope’s high-
avoid the time and capital lost on dry wells, but also to more accurately gauge and more effectively performance computing cluster
capitalize on major of discoveries. This impact was seen in Repsol’s decision to purchase a major delivers a six-fold increase in
processing throughput over the
stake in the deepwater Shenzi field in the Gulf of Mexico, now one of the world’s largest offshore oil- previous platform.
producing areas. The fact that Repsol was able to map the Shenzi field before any other companies
Intelligent
gave it valuable insights that it was able to take advantage of and position it favorably for future By rendering complex subsurface
development. structures such as salt domes
in greater detail, Repsol can
substantially curb drilling risk,
As mentioned above, the powerful business case Ortigosa and his team presented to Repsol’s resulting in fewer dry holes and
lost opportunities.
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.”

5. Repsol’s management saw its faith in Kaleidoscope amply rewarded. The most obvious measure The Makings of Success…
was the fact that the project came in on time and within budget and produced an impressive streak Receptiveness
at the Top
of exploration successes. On the broader stage, the magnitude of Repsol’s achievement was
The powerful business
further underscored by the recognition it received from industry observers, including the Commercial case Ortigosa and his team
Technology of the Year award at the Platts Global Energy Awards and being named one of the presented to Repsol’s senior
management wasn’t the
five most innovative projects worldwide by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in only factor in the company’s
2008. Most recently, Petroleum Economist magazine named it the Energy Company of the Year for decision to go ahead. The fact
that it coincided with a shift
embracing technology in all areas, from exploration to refining to investigating new sources of energy, in executive attitudes toward
as well as in looking for more efficient ways of using the finite resource that is oil. technology—and “a new way
of doing business”—created a
favorable environment for the
breakthrough approach that
the team was proposing.
Leadership is…
Successful “Leapfrogging” For more information
Please contact your IBM sales
“The Kaleidoscope Project has had a profound representative or IBM Business Partner.
impact, not only for the results it has obtained, but Or visit us at:
because it has created a new trend in the manner ibm.com/chemicalspetroleum
in which innovation is viewed within our industry.”
Francisco Ortigosa, on how Kaleidoscope has
changed the way the industry thinks about exploration
Asked what the future holds for the oil and gas exploration industry as a whole, Ortigosa sees more
challenging environments—deeper and farther offshore—as a trend that will continue, with Repsol’s
recent major deepwater finds off West Africa and Brazil good examples. To meet these challenges,
Repsol is developing even more powerful algorithms that will take advantage of the advanced
high performance computing capabilities that underpin Project Kaleidoscope. With that approach,
Ortigosa sees Repsol leading a trend that others in the industry are likely to follow. “The Kaleidoscope
Project has had a profound impact, not only for the results it has obtained, but because it has created
a new trend in the manner in which innovation is viewed within our industry,” explains Ortigosa. “With
this project we truly are inventing the future.”
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2010 IBM Corporation 1 New Orchard Rd. Armonk, NY 10504 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America January 2010 All Let’s Build a Smarter Planet
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