Shell to expand R&D center in Bangalore

Shell will hire an additional 600 researchers and engineers in the company’s Bangalore technology center and by 2015, the company will move to a new 40-acre campus in Devanahalli, located in the outskirts of India.
The US$470 billion oil and gas company established the technology center in 2006, which is currently manned by 900 R&D staff, split across two leased facilities. The center is one of only three facilities of its kind in the world. The other two are in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and in Houston, Texas in the U.S., each employing around 1,200 researchers. Shell’s expansion plans in Bangalore could become the company’s biggest in three years.
Matthias Bichsel, director of projects and technology of Royal Dutch Shell, was in Bangalore for the laying of the foundation stone of the new campus. He said that the Bangalore center was Shell’s lead center for bitumen research, which created different kinds of asphalt applications for roads. It is also a major center of computational science, which involves gathering massive amounts of data which are then used to construct mathematical and software models for analysis and problem solving.
“The center is modeling, for instance, the surface of our giant oil field in Majnoon in Iraq. It will tell us where to drill the wells, where to locate what,” Bichsel said.
The Bangalore center also leads Shell’s water technology group, and develops solutions to reduce water in the energy discovery and development process. (November 10, 2012)