BP Ventures has invested $5 million in Belmont Technology’s Series A financing to further bolster BP’s artificial intelligence (AI) and digital capabilities in its upstream business.
The investment supports BP’s ongoing work exploring opportunities to apply machine learning and cognitive computing in its global oil and gas business.
The Houston technology start-up has developed a cloud-based geoscience platform using AI. The platform has a string of unique capabilities including specially designed knowledge graphs. BP experts feed the platform geology, geophysics, reservoir, and historic project information. It intuitively links that information together, identifying new connections and work flows and creating a robust knowledge graph of BP’s subsurface assets. Much like data searches available in the consumer domain, BP experts can then interrogate the data, asking the powerful knowledge-graph specific questions in natural language. The technology then uses AI neural networks to interpret results and perform rapid simulations.
Aimed at accelerating project life cycles, from exploration through to reservoir modeling, the technology is targeting a 90% time reduction in data collection, interpretation, and simulation.
David Eyton, BP’s group head of technology, said, “This AI-based platform, which we’ve nicknamed Sandy, is expected to unlock critical data for our subsurface engineers at a much accelerated pace. Our experts will ask it questions about our reservoirs like, ‘What factors control production in the Chirag field?’ Sandy will then interpret our data, including mapping out many more scenarios than are currently constructed, helping us make faster, better informed upstream decisions."