Applied Artificial Intelligence in the Subsurface

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mason Dykstra ◽  
Ben Lasscock

Abstract In this paper we present an example of improved approaches for how to interact with data and leverage artificial intelligence for the subsurface. Currently, subsurface workflows typically rely on a lot of time-consuming manual input and analysis, but the promise of artificial intelligence is that, once properly trained, an AI can take care of the more routine tasks, leaving the domain expert free to work on more complex and creative parts of the job. Artificial intelligence work on subsurface datasets in recent years has typically taken the form of research and proof of concept type work, with a lot of one-off solutions showing up in the literature using new and innovative ideas (e.g. Hussein et al, 2021; Misra et al, 2019). Oftentimes this work requires a good degree of data science knowledge and programming skills on the part of the scientist, putting many of the approaches outlined in these and a multitude of other papers out of reach for many subsurface experts in the Oil and Gas industry. In order for Artificial Intelligence to become applied as part of regular workflows in the subsurface, the industry needs tools built to help subsurface experts access AI techniques in a more practical, targeted way. We present herein a practical guide to help in developing applied artificial Intelligence tools to roll out within your organization or to the industry more broadly.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Israel Guevara ◽  
David Ardila ◽  
Kevin Daza ◽  
Oscar Ovalle ◽  
Paola Pastor ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (01) ◽  
pp. 12-13
Author(s):  
Manas Pathak ◽  
Tonya Cosby ◽  
Robert K. Perrons

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captivated the imagination of science-fiction movie audiences for many years and has been used in the upstream oil and gas industry for more than a decade (Mohaghegh 2005, 2011). But few industries evolve more quickly than those from Silicon Valley, and it accordingly follows that the technology has grown and changed considerably since this discussion began. The oil and gas industry, therefore, is at a point where it would be prudent to take stock of what has been achieved with AI in the sector, to provide a sober assessment of what has delivered value and what has not among the myriad implementations made so far, and to figure out how best to leverage this technology in the future in light of these learnings. When one looks at the long arc of AI in the oil and gas industry, a few important truths emerge. First among these is the fact that not all AI is the same. There is a spectrum of technological sophistication. Hollywood and the media have always been fascinated by the idea of artificial superintelligence and general intelligence systems capable of mimicking the actions and behaviors of real people. Those kinds of systems would have the ability to learn, perceive, understand, and function in human-like ways (Joshi 2019). As alluring as these types of AI are, however, they bear little resemblance to what actually has been delivered to the upstream industry. Instead, we mostly have seen much less ambitious “narrow AI” applications that very capably handle a specific task, such as quickly digesting thousands of pages of historical reports (Kimbleton and Matson 2018), detecting potential failures in progressive cavity pumps (Jacobs 2018), predicting oil and gas exports (Windarto et al. 2017), offering improvements for reservoir models (Mohaghegh 2011), or estimating oil-recovery factors (Mahmoud et al. 2019). But let’s face it: As impressive and commendable as these applications have been, they fall far short of the ambitious vision of highly autonomous systems that are capable of thinking about things outside of the narrow range of tasks explicitly handed to them. What is more, many of these narrow AI applications have tended to be modified versions of fairly generic solutions that were originally designed for other industries and that were then usefully extended to the oil and gas industry with a modest amount of tailoring. In other words, relatively little AI has been occurring in a way that had the oil and gas sector in mind from the outset. The second important truth is that human judgment still matters. What some technology vendors have referred to as “augmented intelligence” (Kimbleton and Matson 2018), whereby AI supplements human judgment rather than sup-plants it, is not merely an alternative way of approaching AI; rather, it is coming into focus that this is probably the most sensible way forward for this technology.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Armstrong Lee Agbaji

Abstract Historically, the oil and gas industry has been slow and extremely cautious to adopt emerging technologies. But in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the industry has broken from tradition. It has not only embraced AI; it is leading the pack. AI has not only changed what it now means to work in the oil industry, it has changed how companies create, capture, and deliver value. Thanks, or no thanks to automation, traditional oil industry skills and talents are now being threatened, and in most cases, rendered obsolete. Oil and gas industry day-to-day work is progressively gravitating towards software and algorithms, and today’s workers are resigning themselves to the fact that computers and robots will one day "take over" and do much of their work. The adoption of AI and how it might affect career prospects is currently causing a lot of anxiety among industry professionals. This paper details how artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics has redefined what it now means to work in the oil industry, as well as the new challenges and responsibilities that the AI revolution presents. It takes a deep-dive into human-robot interaction, and underscores what AI can, and cannot do. It also identifies several traditional oilfield positions that have become endangered by automation, addresses the premonitions of professionals in these endangered roles, and lays out a roadmap on how to survive and thrive in a digitally transformed world. The future of work is evolving, and new technologies are changing how talent is acquired, developed, and retained. That robots will someday "take our jobs" is not an impossible possibility. It is more of a reality than an exaggeration. Automation in the oil industry has achieved outcomes that go beyond human capabilities. In fact, the odds are overwhelming that AI that functions at a comparable level to humans will soon become ubiquitous in the industry. The big question is: How long will it take? The oil industry of the future will not need large office complexes or a large workforce. Most of the work will be automated. Drilling rigs, production platforms, refineries, and petrochemical plants will not go away, but how work is done at these locations will be totally different. While the industry will never entirely lose its human touch, AI will be the foundation of the workforce of the future. How we react to the AI revolution today will shape the industry for generations to come. What should we do when AI changes our job functions and workforce? Should we be training AI, or should we be training humans?


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 1868-1874

Global oil prices have encouraged the development of the oil and gas industry. The passion for the revival of the oil and gas industry needs to be followed by solid steps. Efficiency is a theme in all business aspects. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is believed to be able to help realize the achievement of the company's goal. But EA implementation is challenging. The company must provide sufficient resources to ensure the EA implementation goal is achieved. It is therefore necessary to estimate the EA implementation to detect any gaps. This research offers a method to estimate the EA in the upstream petroleum industry. The method is a combined approach of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and structured interviews. Interviews were conducted with a modified System Usability Scale (SUS) using the perspective of effectiveness, efficiency, agility, and durability. The evaluation results concluded that the EA implementation was still below the usability threshold. This fact encourages further EA development efforts, including the selection and utilization of specific and simple EA components.


Fluids ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Hosseini Boosari

Multiphase flow of oil, gas, and water occurs in a reservoir’s underground formation and also within the associated downstream pipeline and structures. Computer simulations of such phenomena are essential in order to achieve the behavior of parameters including but not limited to evolution of phase fractions, temperature, velocity, pressure, and flow regimes. However, within the oil and gas industry, due to the highly complex nature of such phenomena seen in unconventional assets, an accurate and fast calculation of the aforementioned parameters has not been successful using numerical simulation techniques, i.e., computational fluid dynamic (CFD). In this study, a fast-track data-driven method based on artificial intelligence (AI) is designed, applied, and investigated in one of the most well-known multiphase flow problems. This problem is a two-dimensional dam-break that consists of a rectangular tank with the fluid column at the left side of the tank behind the gate. Initially, the gate is opened, which leads to the collapse of the column of fluid and generates a complex flow structure, including water and captured bubbles. The necessary data were obtained from the experience and partially used in our fast-track data-driven model. We built our models using Levenberg Marquardt algorithm in a feed-forward back propagation technique. We combined our model with stochastic optimization in a way that it decreased the absolute error accumulated in following time-steps compared to numerical computation. First, we observed that our models predicted the dynamic behavior of multiphase flow at each time-step with higher speed, and hence lowered the run time when compared to the CFD numerical simulation. To be exact, the computations of our models were more than one hundred times faster than the CFD model, an order of 8 h to minutes using our models. Second, the accuracy of our predictions was within the limit of 10% in cascading condition compared to the numerical simulation. This was acceptable considering its application in underground formations with highly complex fluid flow phenomena. Our models help all engineering aspects of the oil and gas industry from drilling and well design to the future prediction of an efficient production.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (02) ◽  
pp. 23-28
Author(s):  
Judy Feder

For an industry in which terms like “first ever,” “unparalleled,” “unprecedented,” and “novel” are often over-used to the point of losing their meaning, 2020 hit hard with the true meaning of those words as the COVID-19 pandemic exploded onto the world and disrupted almost everything about life as we knew it. The oil and gas industry, which had begun showing signs of recovery from a generational downturn, was hit particularly hard. Jobs were lost, companies shuttered, and supply chains upended. But the same combination of audacity and ingenuity that has driven the industry for over a century took hold quickly. Oil and gas people love - and need - to network, share ideas, transfer and apply technology, and gather intelligence. So, when in-person conferences, workshops, and tradeshows were suddenly canceled or indefinitely postponed, entities such as the Society of Petroleum Engineers scrambled to use digital technology to take those events online and make them virtual. While not a perfect replacement, virtual online events offer some unique advantages, as SPE technical directors pointed out in their annual roundup. Digitalization, long a controversial topic among many in the upstream sector, is now being called essential by the directors across the six SPE technical disciplines they lead. Automation is mentioned frequently in the directors’ comments as a growing contributor to efficiency and risk reduction. Capital discipline, balance sheet management, and cash flow are seen as crucial, as are collaboration (both internal and external) and value - ranging from core values to value-driven data, to provable, value-based outcomes. Agility and the ability to comply with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria have taken on new importance. So has work - how and where we do it, and how we balance it with other aspects of life. Knowledge dissemination is considered more important than ever. Uncertainty continues to characterize the upstream sector, even more so than before the pandemic, but at least one thing is certain: The work of the industry, and the way in which people who comprise it work, is forever changed. The SPE technical disciplines and the directors who lead them are as follows. Completions - Terry Palisch, CARBO Ceramics Data Science and Engineering Analytics - Silviu Livescu, Baker Hughes Drilling - David Reid, NOV HSE and Sustainability - Annamaria Petrone, Eni Production and Facilities - Robert Pearson, Glynn Resources Reservoir - Erdal Ozkan, Colorado School of Mines Here, they reflect on a truly unprecedented year and share their outlooks for their disciplines going forward.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayman Amer ◽  
Ali Alshehri ◽  
Hamad Saiari ◽  
Ali Meshaikhis ◽  
Abdulaziz Alshamrany

Abstract Corrosion under insulation (CUI) is a critical challenge that affects the integrity of assets where the oil and gas industry is not immune. Its severity arises due to its hidden nature as it can often times go unnoticed. CUI is stimulated, in principle, by moisture ingress through the insulation layers to the surface of the pipeline. This Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered detection technology stemmed from an urgent need to detect the presence of these corrosion types. The new approach is based on a Cyber Physical (CP) system that maximizes the potential of thermographic imaging by using a Machine Learning application of Artificial Intelligence. In this work, we describe how common image processing techniques from infra-red images of assets can be enhanced using a machine learning approach allowing the detection of locations highly vulnerable to corrosion through pinpointing locations of CUI anomalies and areas of concern. The machine learning is examining the progression of thermal images, captured over time, corrosion and factors that cause this degradation are predicted by extracting thermal anomaly features and correlating them with corrosion and irregularities in the structural integrity of assets verified visually during the initial learning phase of the ML algorithm. The ML classifier has shown outstanding results in predicting CUI anomalies with a predictive accuracy in the range of 85 – 90% projected from 185 real field assets. Also, IR imaging by itself is subjective and operator dependent, however with this cyber physical transfer learning approach, such dependency has been eliminated. The results and conclusions of this work on real field assets in operation demonstrate the feasibility of this technique to predict and detect thermal anomalies directly correlated to CUI. This innovative work has led to the development of a cyber-physical that meets the demands of inspection units across the oil and gas industry, providing a real-time system and online assessment tool to monitor the presence of CUI enhancing the output from thermography technologies, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology. Additional benefits of this approach include safety enhancement through non-contact online inspection and cost savings by reducing the associated scaffolding and downtime.


Author(s):  
Shubham Parsoya Et.al

Digital transformation in the field of oil and Gas industry is already a significant impact creator. It is actually act like catalyst through which the overall functionality of the oil and gas industry get enhanced and the overall output with the help of technologically-advanced mechanism, increased up to manifold. In the present scenario, the over-all quest is not just about the volume of the oil and petroleum, but it is also regarding the overall value generated throughout the process. And such enhanced level of value generation is taking place with great pace with the help of enhanced level of implementations of different types of technologies in different type of activities related to the oil and gas industry. In the present scenario, oil and gas industry’s business model is no longer depending upon just the inflated and narrow based value-chain mechanism. It is actually depending upon the almost all modernized and futuristic technologies. The modern technologies include big data analytics, 3D printing technology, cyber security, digital marketing, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, drone technologies, database management system, etc. all these technologies are not only supports in handling the overall business capability of the oil and Gas Industries, but also eliminate the overall negative impact generating elements. With the help of technologies and digital transformation, the overall profitability of the oil and gas industry enhanced. Digital transformation is a prominent and significant impact creator which is not limited to the oil and gas industry, but also reaching up to the all-global level Businesses. It is transforming the overall business operations by enhancing the speed of innovation and making the use of practical knowledge base which ultimately enhance the overall power of operations and increase efficiencies. With the emergence of digital transformation technologies especially with the emergence of big data analytics, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence have supports several types of innovative and new ways of developing and transforming the overall market as well as the customer satisfaction in significant manner. All such innovative technologies and digital transformations are contributing significantly in shaping the future of oil and gas industry


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joy Ugoyah ◽  
Anita Mary Igbine

Abstract Faster and more accurate decisions are what the Oil and Gas industry needs with the world's fast-evolving energy needs and economy. The area of Artificial intelligence and Data-driven modelling is relatively new and has not found popular application in the industry. AI is an emerging technology that can be used to predict event outcomes and automate anomaly-detection processes. The various applications of AI in different industries were researched into. This paper highlighted important processes that can be improved with the application of Artificial Intelligence through data-driven modelling. It also highlights areas in the various industries where AI intelligence is already being applied and ways it can be improved. AI and data-driven modelling has the potential to improve exploration accuracy, reduce production down-time, reduce cost of maintenance, and reduce health and safety risks. This body of information can serve as a guideline for adopting AI in the oil and gas industry. A trend of industry-tailored intelligence solutions would be more effective in the evolving energy industry.


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