"my country's oil and gas industry is facing difficulties such as declining resource quality, reduced crude oil production, and high dependence on foreign oil and gas. In 2017, my country's dependence on foreign crude oil reached 67.4%, and this trend is expected to continue rising. The energy industry needs to be more open-minded and accelerate its innovation pace more than ever before." On July 13th, a symposium on interdisciplinary energy science was held in Beijing. More than ten academicians spoke freely about energy technology innovation. Hu Wenrui, Director of the Engineering Management Division of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, expressed the above views. He believes that the cross-disciplinary integration and innovation of energy and cutting-edge disciplines will be the best path for future energy technology innovation.
"Interdisciplinary research has become the mainstream direction of global scientific and technological development, an important way to achieve major scientific discoveries and produce leading, original, and disruptive results, and an important way to enhance innovation capabilities and cultivate top talents," said Zhao Wenzhi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of the my country Petroleum Exploration and Development Research Institute. He added that in the past 25 years, the proportion of Nobel Prizes won through interdisciplinary collaborative research has approached 50%, and this trend is increasing year by year.
Currently, the energy sector is becoming one of the most active areas for disruptive technological innovation, with emerging disruptive technologies such as solar power generation, high-efficiency energy storage, fuel cell lithium batteries, and hydrogen energy constantly appearing. Major world powers are using disruptive technologies as a strategic move to seize the commanding heights of science and technology, focusing their efforts on key breakthroughs and achieving significant progress.
"Most disciplines in the energy field are applied disciplines. Absorbing and learning from the latest research results in basic and cutting-edge fields, and promoting interdisciplinary and integrated innovation in the energy field is the only way to accelerate energy technology innovation," Zhao Wenzhi said frankly. He cited the shale oil and gas revolution in the United States as the best example, which not only promoted the realization of the US energy independence strategy, but also profoundly changed the global energy supply pattern.
"Behind the meteoric rise of shale oil and gas in the United States lies 30 years of continuous basic research and the resulting disruptive innovation in engineering technology," said Zhao Wenzhi. He added that breakthroughs in core technologies such as horizontal well drilling and large-scale multi-stage hydraulic fracturing technology stem from the cross-disciplinary and integrated innovation of oil and gas science with fields such as information, materials, and control.
Currently, technological innovation is entering an unprecedented period of intense activity. "The new generation of information technologies, represented by big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum information, are accelerating their breakthroughs and applications, while advanced manufacturing technologies integrating robotics, digitalization, and new materials are being rapidly advanced." In Hu Wenrui's view, the cross-disciplinary and integrated innovation of energy and cutting-edge disciplines is demonstrating tremendous energy that is transformative, revolutionary, and disruptive, and may even trigger a global energy revolution.
This symposium was hosted by the Engineering Management Division of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and organized by the my country Petroleum Exploration and Development Research Institute. Zhao Wenzhi revealed that, on the one hand, the institute will focus on major scientific issues facing upstream oil and gas development in the next 5-10 years, strengthening research on spatial distribution prediction of remaining oil and gas resources based on big data and intelligent theories, and intelligent oil displacement technology for full reservoir development. On the other hand, it will also independently establish a number of academy-level advanced basic research projects to conduct forward-looking research in areas such as nano-displacement agents and high-performance metal battery energy storage technology; some projects have already made significant progress.
