Large language models combine with semantic web tech to ‘reformulate’ knowledge engineering. TotalEnergies pilot combines multiple toolsets to ‘revolutionize’ oil discovery.
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Chevron shifts seismic to OSDU SDMS in Azure cloud
OSDU Forum presentation shows dependencies on SLB toolset. Performance enhancement reported. Enterprise deployment halted in face of uncertain cloud costs.
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IANAL. However ...
Oil IT Journal editor Neil McNaughton is not a lawyer. But he observes that much of a corporation’s key intellectual property resides in ‘legal’. Should we allow the large language models to access our contracts? What broader ‘conclusions’ can an LLM draw from ‘secret’ company stuff?
A while ago in my time as a consultant I was working with a mid-size
E&P outfit on a document management system. Things were going
reasonably well until we tried to include the legal department in the
venture. The lawyers had a healthy skepticism of our efforts. They did
not trust the security. They feared that secret documents would be
visible by people who should not see them. Perhaps they feared that by
sharing their work with others in the organization people would see how
little they actually did …
Although this was ‘a while ago’, it was not so long that things were
not yet ‘digital’. OK, they may not have been ‘digitized’ or
‘digitalized’ as some fatuously taxonomize ‘progress’ in information
technology, but I digress. I think that the lawyers probably used their
PCs, and shared/exchanged documents via ‘sneakernet*’. Maybe they had
some sophisticated legal DMS software that allowed all sorts of version
control and secure sharing. I don’t know – they didn’t really talk to
us. The point of this reminiscence is that, the stuff in the legal
department was totally hidden from view to any DMS, search engine and,
looking to the future, large language models.
Speaking of which, an observation from the EAGE Digital event we
report on in this issue. When geologists put LLMs through their paces,
they might ask questions along the lines of, ‘What is the porosity and
permeability of the such and such in such and such an area’ or perhaps
more interestingly, ‘What is the best exploration strategy for a
startup working in Norway’. The capability of the LLM to answer the
first question depends on how much data is visible to the LLM. A good
answer to the second question might involve a knowledge of legal
agreements between companies and regulators. Some of which may be
publicly available, but more probably it will be hidden from view by
the legal department.
I’m sure that the LLM vendors do a great job of convincing their
corporate clients that the bespoke model that is being developed for
them a) requires all the company’s data and documents to work and b)
that non of this confidential data will ‘leak’ back into the system and
be available in some form or another to future users – public or
private. But given that there has been considerable debate as to how an
LLM actually works, how difficult it is to ‘explain’ its findings, then
it is quite possible that even if the details of some documents are
declared as ‘private’, the LLM may be capable of arriving at more
general conclusions from your intellectual property. This is especially
worrisome if your competitors are using the same LLM vendors that also
get to peek at their ‘confidential’ documents.
No I hear you say, ‘confidential’ is ‘confidential’. You have placed
your trust in ChatGPT and Microsoft and are sure that they are playing
ball. But information is funny stuff. It is actually quite hard to say
what is or should be ‘confidential’. Traffic analysis
has been used by spies to exploit publicly available information to
learn about the enemy’s activity. The US is rumored to have used Soviet
railway timetables to see where nuclear silos were being built.
An LLM may learn from the simple fact that you, as a successful
operator, have an unusually large (or small) ‘confidential’ repository.
There will always be some metadata upstream of the secrets that is
potentially exploitable. And so the LLM, if it is really ‘smart’, will
be learning something generic from your stuff which will make the
model, and subsequent users including your competitors, smarter too.
As I editorialize, Microsoft/Office 365 is checking everything that
I write and making helpful (and sometimes not so helpful) suggestions.
How much of what we write is creeping back into Copilot or the Office
365 smarts? To find out, you will have to read and understand all the
end user legal agreements (you know, those things where you click ‘OK’
just to install an OS or a software package). Well at least this is
something that the legal department can get its teeth into. Meanwhile,
as AkerBP’s Peder Aursand observed at the EAGE, ‘OpenAI and others are moving into the domain space’.
* Walking from one office to another with a floppy disk or USB stick.
FORCE Integrated reservoir Group
Norwegians look into uncertainty and bias in oil and gas reservoir forecasting. Poor E&P performance is a recurring issue. Is this down to cognitive bias? Or perhaps more sinister ‘strategic misrepresentation’.
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Letter to the Editor
ODU data loading may be ‘expensive’ but data access is ‘simply impossible’.
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Computational Stratigraphy
Chevron presentation at the 17th Rice University Energy HPC Conference ‘closes the gap’ between subsurface characterization and reservoir modeling with CompStrat and a ‘learned stratigraphic simulator’. Technology now embedded in SLB’s Delfi.
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Software, hardware short takes
Upstream: TAQA Thruster’s 10,000 runs. Beicip-Franlab OpenFlow Suite 2024. Exprodat UA 3.2. Petrosys PRO 2024.1. Operations: FLIR ADGiLE. Aveva InTouch Unlimited. Cognite Atlas AI. Kongsberg progresses remote operated ships. New Arpels Retos. RuggON PX501. LoRa ATL-1 Wireless Link. SyncTwin builds digital twins from Excel. Other: ISG Provider Lens on service sector. Workrise Vendor Management. Select AI – GeaAI for SQL. Kitware Trame.
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Rice AI in Energy Workshop
Intel presentation shows successful AI-based full waveform inversion on the CPU.
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Foks, facts, orgs …
Movers and shakers in this issue hail from ABL, Asset Guardian Solutions, Bridger Photonics, Kitware, Infrastructure Networks, Research Data Alliance, Global Reporting Initiative, Modelica Association, Open Geospatial Consortium, Petras and USPI-NL.
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Done deals
Dresser secure Blue Owl Capital’s cash. FieldComm acquires FDI assets. Finite State bags MergeBase. Hexagon buys Voyansi. JFrog to acquire Qwak AI. Nekkar ASA buys Globetech AS. Noble buys Diamond Offshore. Linqx acquires Pegasus Vertex. Petroac forbearance extended. Petrosys acquires Talus. SLB delists from Euronext Paris. Velo3D gets non compliance notice from the New York Stock Exchange.
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EAGE Digital demistifying GenAI
Speakers from Chevron, S&P Global, Nvidia, Pega and Cognite attempt to demystifying generative AI. For Nvidia, there is no time for a budget/planning cycle – just do it! ‘Go big or go home!’ Chevron’s chairman believes LLM will transform the value chain. Cognite warns of hallucinations and ‘poetry’ generation. AkerBP’s ExpRes Copilot and the ‘opportunity cost’ goldmine. But it takes a decade to develop an AI ‘product’.
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2024 OPC Foundation Day
Aker BP’s Digital Foundation project. OPC Companion spec for Oil & Gas. OPC Cloud consolidates previous information models and cyber specs. Siemens floats energy management model.
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EAGE Digital 2024 AI Use Cases
Aramco – from paper to digits (sans AI!). TotalEnergies ‘golden set’ of well tops. Tellus – LLM not yet prime time. OpenVDS for TE Sismage. Cegal exposes Diskos data ‘goldmine’. Shell ‘moonshot’ group kicked out of Google! Modeling with Meta’s SAM. Wintershall – in house development ‘last option’. Tellus on conditional facies simulation with SAGAN. Analysis Center’s seismic ML. C3.ai’s GenAI ‘100% accurate’.
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Sales, partnerships, deployments
E&P: Ovation Data supports PGS. Armada edge for Landmark. Roxar monitors Equinor. Petrobras signs with Geoteric. IWS and ProFrac leverage MQTT. SLB partners with Aker BP, TotalEnergies. Shearwater deploys Nvidia superchips. Facilities: Sercel Marlin for ExxonMobil. Petrosafe engages Longitude Engineering. Equinor signs with SLB/OneSubsea. Equinor deploys Seeq. Offshore: Aveva PI System certified by DNV. Downstream: ExxonMobil renews partnership with CGI. Heide to use Flowserve Energy Advantage. Office of Clean Energy selects HyVelocity H2 partnership. Cognite trials robotics with Equinor. Financial: SAP AI for OMV spend management. Other: Viridien/CGG pivots with Ranch Computing. Altair One in Google Cloud marketplace. Esri spatial analytics in Microsoft Fabric.
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Standards stuff
E&P: IOGP Lessons in alarm management for well operations. Energistics’ JSON style guide. IOGP seismic bin grid data. Facilities: USPI-NL V1.1 of FL3DMS and CFIHOS alignment. IOGP Offshore Infrastructure Survey Data Model guidelines. National Academy of Construction signs MoU with Construction Industry Institute. Process Control: FieldComm announces FDT Strategic Integration Committee’. PA-DIM V1.1 released. Financial: XBRL Currency & Country Code Taxonomies out, digital signatures in XBRL now candidate recommendation. Sustainability: GRI/ESRS alignment review. IFRS Foundation and ISSB report alignment. IFRS collaborates with GRI. Other: W3C Data Privacy Vocabulary. Object Management Group’s AI Working Group.
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Going, going … green
Emissions reduction: Argonne’s Decarbonization Scenario Model. Capsol & Audubon team on CO2 capture. Fluenta FlarePhase sensors. DoE funds Pioneer’s Emission Control Treater. Stanford – ‘US emissions much higher than reported’. TotalEnergies’ ‘Ausea’ emissions monitor. CCUS: Saudi Aramco teams with AspenTech on sustainability pathways. Global CCS Institute report on EU funding. NSTA guidance on CCS. DOE selects Omnia Midstream for CCS study. Energy transition: Baringa on Digital transformation and decarbonization. PNAS - ‘Net zero’ needs a rethink. Baker Hughes ‘Wells2Watts’. IHRDC’s ‘Overview of the Energy Transition’. Miscellaneous: IOGP’s environmental data collection user guide. LF Energy ‘AI for Energy’ SIG. EDF MethaneSAT in orbit. TNO Octopus calculator. Siemens’ Comos AI H2 plant configurator.
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USPI-NL on information technology for large capital facility projects.
Croonwolter&dros proposes a common data environment for capital projects to mitigate vendor lock-in and ‘information islands’.
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EAGE Digital 2024 citizen development
Round table on low code development, AutoML to democratize AI. But not all agree on citizen development! Hard to get users to use stuff in face of passive resistance. And not every use case merits an ‘app’.
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BP’s Res-X
EAGE Digital keynote on Databricks-based single point of access for reservoir engineering.
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SAP and open source software
Contributions include ‘friendly fork’ of OpenJDK and participation in billion Euro Open Reference Architecture project.
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