British energy giant BP's technology arm, BP Ventures, has made a $5 million investment in a U.S.-based company to increase the firm's artificial intelligence and digital capabilities in its upstream business, BP announced in a statement Monday.
The investment will help BP explore ways to apply machine learning and cognitive computing in its oil and gas businesses around the world, the company said.
Belmont Technology, a Houston-based start-up company, has developed a cloud-based geoscience platform using artificial intelligence.
BP experts will feed the platform, named Sandy, with geology, geophysics, reservoir and project information. The platform will link all the information together, identify new connections and workflows, and create a knowledge-graph of BP’s subsurface assets.
Later, BP experts will be able to ask specific questions to the knowledge-graph, which will then enable artificial intelligence to perform rapid simulations and interpret results, according to the statement.
The technology will allow BP experts considerable time savings by reducing 90 percent time in data collection, interpretation and simulation, it added.
The platform 'is expected to unlock critical data for our subsurface engineers at a much accelerated pace ... helping us make faster, better-informed upstream decisions,' David Eyton, BP’s group head of technology, said in the statement.
Belmont Technology’s CEO, Jean-Marie Laigle, said: 'Our technology enables real-time thinking for subsurface engineers, helping transform the way teams work, analyze data, understand situations and generate novel ideas.'
In June 2017, BP invested $20 million in a California-based artificial intelligence company for offshore exploration, named Beyond Limits.
By Ovunc Kutlu
Anadolu Agency
energy@aa.com.tr