Offshore staff
OSLO, Norway – Applied Petroleum Technology (APT) has secured research funding to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) solution to help oil companies use biostratigraphic services to plan drilling programs and assess wells.
Biostratigraphy involves the dating of rocks, supported by fossils. According to APT, the technique is obligatory for all exploration wells drilled on the Norwegian continental shelf.
Companies use it for analysis of subsurface geology and to correlate sections in wells both within fields and on a wider regional scale.
However, the study of microfossils and other organic matter from well cuttings and core samples is still conducted manually, using microscopes to quantitatively determine the microfossil content in each sample.
Under the Norwegian Research Council’s NOK5.5-million ($624,000) grant, APT will develop an image digitalization and AI technique and associated software to modernize and improve microscopic analysis concerning fossil content detection and evaluation.
Thomas Løkken Rustad, a palynologist at APT and project manager, said: “With our new image recognition technology and AI-driven analysis method, we can significantly decrease the time used for analyses and obtain data at a more statistically accurate level through mitigating human inconsistencies and biases.
“Overall, this will allow us to provide even faster and better decision support to oil companies’ exploration and drilling teams.”
Currently, APT claims to turn around biostratigraphy analyses within 24 hours where results are critical for decisions during ongoing drilling operations. For other larger and less urgent tasks, turnover times of two to three months are more common.
“Using AI software to localize and quantify the fossil content will reduce turnover time and increase quality and capacity,” Løkken Rustad said.
“The biostratigrapher can cut routine work and instead focus on quality control and interpretation of the data and communicating the results to the client. Further, it can also enable a reduction in biostratigraphic offshore personnel, as analysis work could be carried out onshore, reducing personnel travel as well as health and safety risks.”
Once the research project has finished, APT aims to be the first commercial biostratigraphic company to offer digital palynological services.
The company provides geochemical and biostratigraphic laboratory services, basin modelling, and petroleum systems analysis to operators worldwide.
11/30/2020
