At #DIGEX2019, the conference about the digital subsurface, major technology companies, authorities and big oil and gas players such as Aker BP, Equinor and Repsol presented their digital vision, efforts and learnings in the digital transformation.
One of the frontrunners in this transformation is a small independent oil and gas company focused on the Norwegian shelf: Pandion Energy. Pandion is backed by Kerogen Capital, a private equity specialised in the international upstream oil and gas sector and selected as a pilot for developing an advanced digital subsurface platform. As part of this, Pandion Energy has partnered with Computas and Google and mobilized a dedicated team comprising machine learning, data science and geoscience experts for its digitalization effort.
Kine Johanne Årdal, Pandion’s Digital Manager has a vision of the digital subsurface with the augmented geoscientist in the centre. We have moved from being analog to digital geoscientists and the next step will be to become an augmented geoscientist. The augmented geoscientist will augment him/herself by human-machine collaboration and the use of artificial intelligence as a tool, designed to enhance human intelligence and leverage the human expertise. To achieve this our mindset must be on exponential changes instead of linear changes.
Jan Grønbech from Google Norway agreed when sharing his digital perspectives. He stated that things will happen exponentially, but our brains are made to think linear. For a technology to cause “disruption” it needs to be 10 times better and cheaper.
