In the last decade, we have seen a record-breaking global interest in artificial intelligence (AI) by governments, corporations, and hobbyists. In 2018, Forbes published a piece that shed light on the urgency for corporations to adopt artificial intelligence and its significance for infrastructure leaders. While some organizations (mostly tech companies) are fully aware of the potential competitive advantage with the adoption of AI, many non-tech companies still trail in the automation race and are slowly losing competitiveness. Digital transformation and technical creativity have been the major causes for the steady increase in churn rate among S&P 500 companies. This churn rate is only set to receive a boost with the varied adoption rate of artificial intelligence.
What Is AI?
Artificial intelligence is a field of study that deals with the theory and development of machines that mimic cognitive functions that humans associate with intelligence such as learning and problem solving. Deep learning - the area of machine learning concerned with autonomous and semi-autonomous learning of data representations - has particularly generated a lot of interest due to the role it has played in achieving above-human performance in many cognitive tasks like computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, social network filtering, board games, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.
AI in Oil & Gas
The oil and gas industry has historically been a slow adopter of new technologies owing to the high risks involved with the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas. Nonetheless, the oil and gas industry is a perfect fit for machine learning due to the quantity of data that it generates.
The conscious brain can process only about 2,000 bits per second, while a single server-side GPU processes over 5,000 GB/s. These GPUs can also be stacked to perform computations in parallel leading to even greater performance.
Some of the major E&P companies have realized the competitive significance of leading the race in the implementation of artificial intelligence. Not surprisingly, the AI market in oil and gas has been estimated to reach US $2.85 billion by 2022.
Applications
The potential applications of artificial intelligence in oil and gas is limitless and cuts across all strategic business units:
- Precision drilling and autonomous drilling
- Data extraction
- Data mining, analysis and interpretation
- Inspection
- Anomaly detection
- Forecasts and predictions
- Decision making
- Systems modeling and development of twin systems
- Design
- Logistics planning
- Daily operations
- Power management
- Optimization
NthDS is one of the leading companies that specializes in the research, development, and implementation of artificial intelligence solutions within the oil and gas industry. Our flagship product, Nspect, for geophysical data extraction and digitization, outperforms the previous industry preferred solutions in accuracy, efficiency, and usability.
If you're interested in staying ahead of - or just keeping pace with - the evolutionary curve, contact us and schedule a demo.