Artificial Intelligence in Early Stage Exploration at Wintershall Dea

Successful exploration relies on quickly managing uncertainties and opportunities. Examples include bidding rounds or farm-in offers. Explorationists must quickly develop an understanding of the available data and the implications on value of the assets. Under strong time pressure to develop reliable evaluations, any technology to speed up a comprehensive overview of data is beneficial. A cognitive exploration advisor tool that intuitively provides an overview of subsurface analogues to new projects will reduce cycle times and improve effectiveness. By ingesting internal and external sources, the tool enables research with lower uncertainties in a shorter time. In 2019, Wintershall Dea performed a pilot to develop a cognitive tool to support searching unstructured data. The pilot concluded with promising results: in less than 3 months, we created a minimum viable product that could search for key words and concepts and identify these in documents used for training the cognitive engine. The tool also extracted tables and images. Search results were presented in a GIS interface with queries geographically constrained by user-defined polygons. Users testing the system experienced increasingly effective and timely searches and considered this to be quite helpful in their daily work.