The project “Machine learning and artificial intelligence for risk assessment in early exploration stages” was distinguished among more than 350 proposals at RDPETRO awards ceremony, held in Abu Dhabi, on 9th and 10th May, 2018. The project will be coordinated by CERENA (Amilcar Soares (PI), Leonardo Azevedo, Maria João Pereira) with the partnership of IT (Mário Figueiredo, José Bioucas-Dias).
This joint research will address one of the most important challenges of the oil and gas industry: to assess the risk and the chance of success, irrespective of the presence or absence, of a gas or oil reservoir. This phase is crucial once the following steps will require “an extraordinarily high financial risk”, stressed the coordinator, professor Amílcar Soares. “This project aims to create an instrument to simulate possible geological scenarios based on the existing knowledge through validation or falsification using Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies”, he adds.
The team is quite pleased to see their work recognised among the top international universities and the best international research centres, “because, in one hand, it shows the scientific relevance of our work”, stresses professor Amílcar Soares. “And on the other hand because project funders are the world’s largest companies of oil industry that are looking for cutting-edge ideas”, he adds.
According to professor Amílcar Soares, the collaboration of CERENA and IT is a “perfect combination to reach the goals of this project”. CERENA has a vast experience in the development and implementation of techniques for integrating seismic imaging, as well as in the stochastic simulation of spatial rock distribution. In turn, IT has “a unique curriculum in ML and AI methodologies that validate/falsify the stochastic achievements of those scenarios”, highlights the CERENA’s researcher.
RDPETRO is the world’s largest gathering of academia, start-ups and tech companies focused on research and technology development for the oil and gas industry. RDPETRO provides a multi-million dollar funding programme sponsored by the largest national and international oil companies to award the most disruptive and innovative projects and ideas that help solve industry’s key challenges.
