Digital Transformation as Total Develops AI solutions with Google Cloud

ARC has blogged several times in the past on the increasing importance for oil & gas companies to seek out strong technology partners in order to fully maximize the benefits provided for by digital transformation and with the ultimate objective being realizing operational excellence.  ARC is especially excited when major oil & gas companies take action to try and optimize their operations on their digital transformation journey.

AI Helping to reduce NPT and improve collaboration

Total and Google Cloud have recently signed an agreement to jointly develop artificial intelligence (A.I.) solutions applied to subsurface data analysis for oil and gas exploration and production.  The agreement focuses on the development of AI programs that will make it possible to interpret subsurface images, notably from seismic studies (using Computer Vision technology) and automate the analysis of technical documents (using NLP technology). These programs will allow Total’s geologists, geophysicists, reservoir and geoinformation engineers to explore and assess oil & gas fields faster and more effectively.  Under this partnership, Total geoscientists will work side-by-side with Google Cloud’s machine learning experts within the same project team based in Google Cloud’s Advanced Solutions Lab in California.

“Total is convinced that applying artificial intelligence in the oil and gas industry is a promising avenue to be explored for optimizing our performance, particularly in subsurface data interpretation. We are excited to work with Google Cloud towards this goal. This builds on the strategy being developed at Total, where A.I. is already used, for example, in predictive maintenance at facilities,” said Marie-Noëlle Semeria, Senior Vice President, Group CTO at Total.

“We believe that the combination of Total’s geoscience expertise and Google’s artificial intelligence skills will ensure the project’s success. Our ambition is to give our geoscience engineers an AI personal assistant in the next few years that will free them up to focus on high value-added tasks.” said Kevin McLachlan, Senior Vice President Exploration for Exploration & Production at Total.

Total began its digital transformation years ago

Total is no stranger to deploying advanced analytics and started applying artificial intelligence to characterize oil & gas fields using machine learning algorithms in the 1990s.  In 2013, Total used machine learning algorithms to implement predictive maintenance for turbines, pumps and compressors at its industrial facilities, thus generating savings of several hundred million dollars. Today, Total teams are exploring multiple machine learning and deep learning applications such as production profile forecasting, automated analysis of satellite images or analysis of rock sample images.

Digital transformation is today’s corporate Nirvana

ARC hopes that other owner-operators, both IOCs and NOCs, will continue to take their journey towards digital transformation despite oil prices reaching the $70’s per barrel range, as we believe that is really the only way to reach nirvana, aka operational excellence, in today’s evolving energy markets.  Future ARC blogs will highlight that a true digital transformation is only partially achieved via technology, with culture and work processes and procedures comprising the other valuable component to success.