Schlumberger today launched its Ocean for Academia Program, signing collaboration contracts with Rice, Stanford, Texas A&M, and Unicamp universities to develop new technology on the Ocean open software platform.

“Successfully collaborating with universities is critical to the future of the oil and gas industry,” said Meyer Bengio, vice president, technology, Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS). “The Ocean for Academia program establishes a collaborative innovation network leveraging the Ocean platform to achieve greater efficiency in bringing research from concept to market. This network includes academia, oil companies and independent software providers.”

The universities will employ Ocean for a number of initial applications. The resulting Ocean plug-ins will augment Petrel seismic-to-simulation workflows in specific research and development (R&D) areas relevant to upstream oil and gas. The program will expand to include additional universities in the coming months.

The Ocean for Academia Program broadens the SIS software donation program to provide greater access to equip students in all exploration and production (E&P) disciplines with the latest learning and research tools.