Adopting the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Oil and Gas Exploration

摘要

Summary The increasing flow of data along with rapid advancements in computing domain have led to the need of new paradigms to optimize the oil and gas exploration workflows. This brings the need of adopting the fourth industrial revolution (IR4), which is a result of emerging technologies such as Big Data, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Our method to adopt IR4 in the exploration domain is based on three pillars. First, alignment is required among entities within a corporate to overcome challenges and establish a roadmap with common goals. Second, awareness needs to be raised among all stakeholders. This can be achieved through formal education, online programs, and workshops. Third, empowerment from different aspects is required, including computing infrastructure, data access, and across domain collaboration. Adopting such paradigm shift is challenging, especially for oil and gas exploration. This is due to the high degree of uncertainty in interpretation data, a return of investment that is not straightforward to measure, and multiple data related challenges such as quality, integration, and traceability. To adopt this new transformation, we recommend a number of steps. Those include data science skills development and a cyclic transformation approach to develop IR4 business cases.