4 March 2019
Author: Hasan Chowdhury
Originally posted on 2/21/2019 on The Telegraph.

 
The Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Gunashli (ACG), a sprawling complex of offshore oil fields 60 miles off Azerbaijan’s capital Baku, is causing somewhat of a headache for BP’s Head of Technology.

“We have huge production in Azerbaijan of wells that are quite prone to producing sand, and sand if it’s produced in high quantities from our oil wells can do damage to the metalwork and also choke back the production,” says David Eyton, BP’s Head of Technology.
 

“The net result of all that is we produce thousands [more] barrels a day than we otherwise would be able to do because we can intelligently manage the integrity of that operation,” says Eyton.
 

The ACG, which pumps out an average of 584,000 barrels of oil per day, is a prized asset for BP, and any hold-ups could cost the company dearly. But the man leading BP’s technology revolution thinks he has a solution: artificial intelligence (AI).

Currently, BP – a company with 74,000 employees – has just “one particular expert” with the skills to reduce sand in oil production at ACG.  Eyton realizes there are some significant problems with depending on a single engineer.

Instead, the energy giant is working to harness the expert’s knowledge by “codifying” it into a system built by Beyond Limits, a US-based AI company that BP’s investment arm took a $20m stake in back in 2017.

Want to read more? Download the full Telegraph piece here.