Offshore staff
KASSEL, Germany – Wintershall Dea is applying an artificial intelligence search engine to support its exploration processes.
The Exploration Advisory Tool, developed with IBM and successfully piloted last year, uses cognitive search technology that provides fast access to Wintershall Dea’s exploration teams.
The AI-powered tool takes information from ‘unstructured’ data such as reports or presentations, and unlike a keyword search, is designed to ‘think’ like a geologist, understanding and extracting data related to a ‘formation’, ‘reservoir’, or other concepts.
This saves the teams time spent manually searching for the same data.
“Artificial intelligence can help us make better decisions about expected gas and oil volumes in the early stages of the value chain,” said Hugo Dijkgraaf, the company’s chief technology officer.
“Digital transformation at Wintershall Dea is about enhancing competitiveness and reducing risk. The roll-out of the Exploration Advisory Tool does exactly that, by enabling better and faster decision making.
“Importantly, it will free up our experienced team to spend more time on the tasks where they add most value.”
The company’s geoscientists worked alongside IBM researchers and data scientists in an IBM Garage to use design thinking to drive innovation.
Stefan Mueck, CTO Cognitive Transformation at IBM, said: “It is a transformation accelerator that brought together an empowered, agile and multi-disciplinary team. And it kept the focus on end users’ needs while building a solution based on leading edge AI technology.”
04/15/2021
