News Releases

03/31/2014

Hitachi and EERC Propose Innovative Solutions for Optimizing “The Bakken”

Data Management for the One of the Largest Oil Fields in the United States

Tarrytown, NY, March 31, 2014 — Hitachi America, Ltd. and the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) today announced that the two companies are partnering to develop technology-driven products, services, and solutions for enhancing the production of oil reserves from the Bakken petroleum system. Covering parts of North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, the Bakken petroleum system is estimated to hold hundreds of billions of barrels of oil.

With nearly 6000 unconventional Bakken petroleum system wells and nearly 200 drilling rigs in North Dakota alone, the sheer volume of data collected to date is staggering. Using powerful analytical tools to compile and evaluate Bakken data, oilfield operators and state officials can better understand the relationships between the productivity of an oil well and a variety of factors, such as how the well was drilled and the geology of the area in which it was drilled. These tools can also be used to identify previously unrecognized relationships in the data. In turn, this improved understanding will enable industry to improve the productivity of current and future Bakken wells.

Over the past several years, the EERC has conducted several research projects that have been geared toward both improving the productivity and efficiency of Bakken development and reducing its environmental footprint. Meanwhile, Hitachi has worked to develop analytical data tools for the conventional oil and gas industry. The two organizations recognized the unique, complementary skill sets that each other had and quickly identified the Bakken oil boom as an opportunity to collaboratively apply their combined expertise in ways that were beneficial for the industry.

“As an unconventional resource, there is much about the Bakken that remains unknown. However, we believe that through our partnership with Hitachi, we will be able to shed light on these unknowns and help guide the next round of discovery,” said John Harju, Associate Director of Research at the EERC.

“At Hitachi we believe in a customer-driven research model where we collaborate with leading industry players to understand the hard problems they face and apply our research techniques to help transform our customers business. This collaboration with EERC complements our in-house strengths in big data analytics with deep domain related expertise in shale oil and gas production. Such collaborations will prove to be instrumental for the success of our IT X OT Convergence program,” said Dr.Umeshwar Dayal, VP and Sr. Fellow Big Data Research Lab, Hitachi America Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 326,000 employees worldwide. The company’s consolidated revenues for fiscal 2012 (ended March 31, 2013) totaled 9041 billion yen (US$96.1 billion). Hitachi is focusing more than ever on its social innovation business, which includes infrastructure systems, information and telecommunication systems, power systems, construction machinery, high functional material and components, automotive systems, and others. For more information, visit www.hitachi.com.

The EERC is a research, development, demonstration, and commercialization facility recognized as one of the world’s leading developers of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies as well as tools and approaches specifically focused on resource assessment and optimization of oil and gas exploration and production performance. The EERC, a high-tech, nonprofit division of the University of North Dakota, operates like a business and pursues an entrepreneurial, market-driven approach to research and development in order to successfully demonstrate and commercialize innovative technologies. For more information, see www.undeerc.org.