Many have called crude oil “black gold;” artificial intelligence might as well be “digital gold” for its boundless potential and value. Chevron AI taps into both to improve its operations.
Chevron’s Intelligence Officer Bill Braun said generative AI can manage colossal amounts of data for the company.
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The technology can also cover geological data for locations with poor coverage. Moreover, artificial intelligence can alert human workers to potential problems to prevent oil supply disruptions.
What can Chevron AI do?
VentureBeat says oil and gas operations generate huge amounts of data. For example, New Mexico’s seismic survey file in New Mexico is roughly 1 petabyte.
For reference, 1 PB is worth 1,000,000 GB, and modern computer hard drives usually contain 1 terabyte or 1,000 GB.
Chevron has been working with graphics processing units or GPUs since 2008 to handle that much compute or computing resources.
Nowadays, this multinational oil and gas firm uses Chevron AI to derive more insights and value from its data.
“AI is a perfect match for the established, large-scale enterprise with huge datasets — that is exactly the tool we need,” Braun explained.
The company comprises 40% of oil production and 15% of natural gas production in the US, so you can imagine how much computing it requires!
Besides data processing, Chevron AI also helps the company remain competitive by analyzing data from the Railroad Commission of Texas.
Braun explained to VentureBeat the publicly available datasets “turned into a chance to learn from your competition.
“If you’re not doing that, they’re learning from you. It’s an enormous accelerant to the way that everyone learned from each other,” he added.
The oil company also uses its AI models to craft engineering standards and specifications.
“If it’s supposed to be six exact constructions, we don’t want our generative AI to get creative there and come up with 12. Those have to be tuned out really tight,” Braun said.
Besides Chevron AI, the energy firm is also developing robotic models so that these machines can perform jobs too dangerous for humans.