Sveshnikov Andrey Vladimirovich

Despite the fact that a lot has been said recently about the end of the oil era, the development of In my opinion, the oil industry will exist and develop in the next 100 years. If we talk about alternative sources, they are used by countries that do not have a sufficient resource base. And those countries, which are luckier, will continue working with the existing resource base, the use of which is economically highly efficient.

The prospect of oil and gas industry development does not mean that it will remain at the same level. In the near future, the industry will be subject to changes in accordance with the defining technological trends. The world economy in the industry is moving towards digitalization and increasing use of artificial intelligence in decision-making, including the oil and gas industry.

In general, more and more valuable are employees who have knowledge not only in their field, but also in IT, analytics and decision making.

Fiber-related technologies are being actively implemented now. It is applied to the communication channel, i.e. it can be used to obtain information directly from wells, receive information on pressure, temperature, their distribution along the well.

A very important part of oil and gas science is modeling, which is used to calculate multi-variant models. With the help of modeling, different implementations of biological models are selected, the most probable ones are selected, and then a rather wide range of calculations on the level of oil production, on expected reserves appears, which is very important.

The most important issue now is the issue of oil recovery enhancement, so it is necessary to understand what technologies can be implemented to extract residual oil from the field. It is important to understand the structure of residual reserves, roughly speaking, we have already extracted "light" oil today; the one that was extracted without much effort. There is also a separate type of oil - high-viscosity oil, which Kazakhstan possesses in huge quantities. We will deal with this type of oil in the next 10-15 years. And today commercial work has begun in KazMunayGas to involve these remaining reserves into development. Apart from high-viscosity oil, we have quite a large amount of oil with heterogeneous permeability, where physical and chemical methods, so-called polymer flooding methods, surfactant alkaline flooding are used. China has gone far in this direction, and, for example, in Russia it is not so developed. I can proudly say that we use polymer flooding in a larger volume than it is used in Russia, and we have deposits where polymer flooding is used on an industrial scale.

The issue of strengthening geological exploration of new deposits is raised in the expert community. I doubt that we have great prospects in the area of geological exploration, as there are still huge resources for additional exploration of existing fields. We still have opportunities to increase the resource base within the existing fields, and due to the fact that we have ready infrastructures there, the direction of additional exploration is quite important from the economic point of view. Exploration of new deposits in itself is a long, expensive and risky process. If geological exploration can "shoot off" in 10-15 years, additional exploration of the existing fields within 5 years may lead to production growth, and the application of enhanced oil recovery methods may be applied as early as next year.

Technological changes do not exist separately from humans. In my opinion, in the oil and gas industry, first of all it is necessary to invest not in technologies, and in people, in their training and development, as any technology requires the perception of people who will work with these technologies. If we do not see support from people, then no technology will be implemented.

The problem of training and professional development of currently working specialists is also relevant for us. Already now in the current production activity we seriously lack chemists-technologists, specialists in geological exploration and geomechanics, specialists in field development, specialists in methods of oil recovery increase.

The relationship between universities and enterprises is also reaching a new level. We try to build active cooperation with universities, which are engaged in scientific research in the field of oil and gas business. In order to solve current problems, we need to involve fundamental science and solve fundamental problems. We want the universities to demonstrate their interest in solving these very problems.

I'd like to conclude by talking about the future of our industry as it relates to employment and changes in requirements for professionals. A very acute problem, which we can't solve yet, is the problem of social employment and social protection of employees working in the oil and gas industry. We are required to understand people's mentality so that people would believe that the government and companies would be as interested in their development as possible. As technology develops, we will not lose jobs. All people will have enough work in the new version of the oil and gas industry, with new technical and technological capabilities.

In addition to specialized skills, there are also pre-professional skills and competencies that are just as important for successful employment and career development. Thus, at the interview it is very important for me to look into the eyes of a person, they reflect how active the person is in life. It is important that a person strives to change his or her life, so that there is a desire to change something in what is happening around. If a person is "crazy" who is ready to work day and night, if he or she dreams about working at night, then this is our person. These are the people we hire and provide them with interesting tasks.