Oil companies are piloting the use of artificial intelligence across the value chain. From finding new oil fields months faster than otherwise possible to predicting failure of multi-million dollar pieces of equipment, oil companies are very excited about its prospects.
While there are many pilots, machine learning (a subset of AI) has few mature use cases in the oil sector relative to the consumer or financial sectors. Predictive maintenance of equipment is a key use in oil, where techniques such as clustering and natural language processing have allowed companies to integrate machine datasets with maintenance records. Predictive maintenance for some assets like pumps and compressors is offered as ‘off-the-shelf’ technology.
Yet it has been difficult to scale these algorithms to predict potential failures at the site level. More promising for its ability to affect top-line revenue is the use of AI in reservoir discovery and optimization. AI can indicate the presence of oil reserves in relation to other geologic features like salt domes. However, use cases are more mature
for its ability to efficiently integrate and manage datasets.
Oil companies have also turned to digital technology to track and reduce their
environmental impact. We believe that energy efficiency and emissions monitoring are the two most promising and developed use cases for digital technology.
Emissions monitoring and reduction - New technologies like drones, nanosatellites and image recognition could help the industry better monitor and reduce emissions from upstream projects through pipelines and transport through to refining. - BP has promised to monitor all its methane emissions using gas-cloud imaging and other technologies on all new major projects globally. It hopes to reduce its methane intensity – the percentage of leaked gas to its total gas sales – below 0.2%. - The unconventional oil production company EOG has used leak detection including through drone inspections to reduce its emissions intensity rate over the last several years. - The OGCI – a consortium of the largest oil companies – invests in promising technology for climate change reduction and mitigation. Five of the 12 investments have been in emissions monitoring from sensors, satellites and reporting.
