Seismic interpretation sees huge speedup as AI agents provide ‘not just buzzwords but real tangible value’. ‘This is different from what we have been doing for the last 100 years!’
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Asset information modeling framework for energy
DNV’s new recommended practice (RP-0670) builds on the results of the Norwegian READI project. The RP leverages the top-level Industrial Data Ontology, promising interoperability and ‘machine-automated reasoning’.
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On seismic risk, outsourcing and AI
Oil IT Journal editor Neil McNaughton traces the risk/reward equation of the seismic business. Majors outsourced their seismic acquisition risk many years ago to contractors. It did not go well for the latter. The advent of AI may be about to tip the balance. The datasets amassed by the multi-client specialists now represent a ‘competitive advantage’ in training new seismic large language models.
A common misconception about the oil and gas business is that it is
high risk. Well, it is high risk if you are talking about the E&P
minnows, but not for the majors that have adopted a strategy that
derisks large chunks of their business. Take for example the seismic
industry. Many years ago some majors actually ran their own seismic
crews. The boom and bust nature of exploration meant that in a
downturn, they had crews on their hands doing nothing. The risk of such
an eventuality was countered by outsourcing the seismic business to
contractors. These enterprising folk were happy to build more and more
complex acquisition devices, from high performance computers in the
field, to multiple massive marine streamers towed behind purpose
designed vessels. In 2014, the last really big downturn, much of this
fancy gear was surplus to requirements. The oils retrenched. Many
contractors went bust, sold to the Chinese or went ‘asset light’ i.e.
they got out of the acquisition business.
The majors meanwhile, being in the driving seat, retained the
decision making and management of their seismic surveys. Company
geophysicists faced with novel exploration challenges could ask the
remaining contractors for pretty much anything they wanted. Sparse
recording? More streamers? Circular shooting? When asked to jump, the
contractors said ‘how high?’ This enabled the oils to adopt a kind of
‘fail fast’ approach with the risk of failure devolved to their
contractors. And failures there have been. Shooting in circles turned
out to be a rather futile exercise. We hear less today about
sparse/interferometry despite its intellectual attractivity. In fact
the whole streamer paradigm and those expensive vessels is being
replaced by ocean bottom nodes which are just ‘much better’!
On the geophysical processing side the majors took a different
approach. The large processing centers were not ‘outsourced’ but kept
in-house. Majors often consider that their own processing software
gives them a competitive advantage. The massive number crunching that
this entails means that the knowledge required to process seismics
extends from physics, through scientific software and into the more
esoteric specificities of computer hardware. The other advantages to an
in-house high performance computing set up are the bragging rights that
a high ranking in the Top500.org bring and the fact that you can walk
visitors round the installation.
The situation may be changing with the arrival of artificial
intelligence (see this month’s lead and our report from the Ken Kennedy
Institute HPC in Energy event in this issue). First, AI runs on a
different architecture (Nvidia GPUs) from conventional HPC and second,
it uses a different programming language (CUDA). Adding to this is the
competition between the geoscientists and the computer scientists.
Standford Professor Biondo Biondi spoke of being ‘disenfranchised’ by
the data science brigade, although he saw some hope in the likelihood
that AI will be doing the specialist code writing, leaving the geos to
do the science.
AI is bringing an even more important development to the seismic
business with the advent of seismic foundation models and deep
learning. Almost everybody involved in the industry is doing this
today. The foundation models that are proving so successful rely on
data, lots and lots of it! While the majors each have pretty good data
sets to play with, they may not be big enough to build the best models.
They are also likely to be patchy, reflecting each player’s historical
and geographical areas of interest. And, if I may make so bold, their
data sets may not be terribly well managed, making harder for the new
data tools to access.
So who does have really big data today? And who does manage it well?
To my thinking the answer is the few remaining contractors who assumed
the oils’ risk back in the day and who also, thanks to their activity
in seismic processing and multi-client work, do data management rather
well too. Some are also streaks ahead in the smart use of the cloud.
Some, notably TGS, as we report elsewhere in this issue, are going
all-in on AI-based processing and interpretation. Perhaps the
risk-reward pendulum is swinging the other way.
EAGE Digital 2025
BP on data-driven seismic interpretation. Chevron’s “thousands of failures” behind the successes. IFPen on GraphRAG for geology. Halliburton “don’t say ‘tight pull’” to Azure. Cimatec on quantum computing and the wave equation. PPDM – “What (indeed) is seismic”. Dedicated OSDU (or was it ADME?) session hears from TotalEnergies, BP. LLMs and daily drilling reports. LLMs in reservoir simulation. BP’s ‘value model’ for digital. TotalEnergies’ ‘boosted’ geoscientist. AkerBP’s ensemble-based ‘value-outtake plan’. BP’s Bifröst platform. Dell – “cloud-vs-on-prem? A false narrative”.
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Nvidia 2025 GTC Energy Session
Nvidia continues to storm the IT world, hitting the GenAI sweet spot with its powerful combination of performant proprietary hardware and software. Shell, Adnoc, TotalEnergies and SLB present AI-enabled projects across operations, simulation and large language models, some with a bewildering number of moving parts!
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Software, hardware short takes
Altair’s HPCWorks 2025. AspechTech V15/Subsurface Intelligence. Digi Connect Sensor XRT-M. GigaIO’s ‘Gryf’, portable AI supercomputer. Golden Software’s Surfer updated. Halliburton’s EarthStar 3D LWD tool. HighByte’s Intelligence Hub API builder. HiveMQ’sPulse. Eliis releases PaleoScan 2025. Oilfield workflow automation by Porosity. SLB Electris/Retina. Sparta Curves. Cognite Atlas AI. Tosibox’ OT cybersecurity solution. Validere Intelligence.
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High Performance Computing for Energy 2025
Annual Rice Ken Kennedy Institute HPC event retains its geophysical ancestry while branching out into climate science. For Stanford, computer scientists are out to ‘disenfranchise’ the researchers! AI is the future of seismic and may replace innumerate geologists! ExxonMobil is constantly benchmarking novel hardware ready for its next big HPC acquisition and the holy grail of full physics-informed wave equation migration. BP pivots from CPU to GPU and from Fortran to Python/Cuda.
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Folks, facts, orgs …
This issue’s movers and shakers hail from: ABL, Aveva, Brüel & Kjær Vibro, Bridger Photonics, Bristlecone, Cognite, Energistics, Forum Energy Technologies, GeoComputing Group, Tyler Jones, Hexagon AB, Houlihan Lokey, IHRDC, IOGP, PPDM Association, S&B, SAP, SeekOps, Siemens AG, OPC Foundation and Porosity.
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Done deals …
AGR buys Techconsult. Carina acquires Ikon Science. Hexagon completes Geomagic and Septentrio acquisitions. Hexagon ALI spin-out. Hg Capital, EQT now hold IFS. Noble Rock Software invests in Energy Worldnet. NYSE warns Nine Energy Services of noncompliance. Wood suspends trading in its shares.
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2025 USPI NL Member Meeting
FL3DMS foundation for the Digital Twin. Fluor proposes tagging project. Technip’s information management. Shell reports poor internal take-up for standards. Excel and PDFs still rule the engineering roost.
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Energistics at The Open Group 2025 Amsterdam Summit
Equinor on the history and current state of Energistics. Kongsberg, Petrolink unveil test servers. New work order object for WitsML. Energistics moots GenAI-based search. OSDU reservoir domain data management interoperability demonstrated with ResqML – now devolved to OSDU.
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Citizen development for TotalEnergies’ traders.
TE deploys serverless algorithmic trading and Amazon IoT Greengrass for battery storage system management. Oil IT Journal finds Amazon’s GenAI popup less than helpful.
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Going, going … green
Bridger Photonics drone-based LiDAR. California Air Resources Board to mandate scope 3 reporting. Energy Dome’s CO2 battery for Engie. IOGP Report on CCS barriers and isolation. Peloton LandView/Map for renewables and alternative energy. Railroad Commission requests funding for leaky wells. Laramie Energy deploys Emerson’s zero-emissions dump valves. UK/Norway hold Offshore Decarbonization Workshop. IPIECA offers water stewardship guidance.
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OMG Standards Day
Oil IT Journal was invited to the Object Management Group’s EU Standards Day held chez SLB in the Paris suburbs. SLB presents its work on the digital twin. Airbus proposes (yet another) standard for data interoperability. W3C’s Web of Things. GfSE in praise of SysML V2 and the Graph Databse. But despite the ontological ‘teasers’, the OMG’s red meat is SysML.
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Sales, partnerships, deployments …
Abu Dhabi signs with Presight, AIQ. Altair integrates with Nvidia Omniverse. Cegal’s ‘Source of Truth’ for Petoro. Aramco deploys DeepSeek AI. Eliis/Next Shot Geomodeling kick-off PaleoModel JIP. GeoComputing and Leostream team. Halliburton and Sekal deliver on-bottom drilling system. Peloton teams with Innova. Imubit and Preem team. Repsol/Accenture on ‘agentification’. Saudi Aramco now ‘Platinum’ member of The Open Group. Seeq integrates with Aveva Connect. TGS partners with SeisWare. Wyvern and NV5 collaborate.
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Standards stuff …
OPC Foundation teams with International Data Spaces on semantic interoperability and data governance. Industrial Digital Twin Association collaborates with Federtec. IOGP Geodesy subcommittee report on geodetics. IOGP Recommended Practice for electrical and power systems. DNV-RP-B205, a framework for digital inventories and on-demand manufacturing. CII publishes Guide to digital transformation of capital projects. Global Mining Guidelines Group to partner with OSDU for Mining. SPE updates CO2 Storage Resources Management System.
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