Shaping the Future of Geosciences with Exponential Technologies for the Fossil Fuel Industry
摘要
Geosciences are critical to addressing global challenges, including sustainable energy production, climate change mitigation, and resource security. Optimizing the exploration and management of a variety of energy resources, including fossil fuels, geothermal sources, and critical minerals required for renewable technologies, requires an in-depth understanding of Earth's complex systems. The inherent complexity, multi-scale, multi-dimensional, multi-variate, and variable quality of geoscience data, which comes from diverse sources like satellite imagery, seismic surveys, borehole measurements, and laboratory analyses, poses a grand analytical challenge. Overcoming these challenges necessitates the development of robust methodologies for data integration, uncertainty quantification, and advanced computational frameworks, alongside holistic and interdisciplinary collaboration. A number of exponential technologies offer a transformation path for advancing geosciences. Some of these technologies, such as Big Data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), drone and robotic systems, wearable devices, and the Metaverse, are maturing rapidly. Although these technologies have some limited uses in the geosciences, their full potential to speed time-to-value has not yet been fully realized. Utilizing the maturity and accessibility of these emerging technologies and tools is essential to finding hidden inefficiencies and unknown insights and creating innovative solutions in geosciences. To that end, this paper presents transformative pathways to maximize the value of Geosciences with these emerging technologies, exemplified by practical case studies.