Aramco’s Executive Vice-President: AI and big data take us into a new world

Aramco’s Executive Vice-President of Technology & Innovation, Ahmad Al-Khowaiter said that under the leadership of His Excellency Minister Abdullah Alswaha, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, LEAP has become one of the world’s leading technology conferences and a must visit destination for entrepreneurs, executives and even technology enthusiasts.

He added: “We at Aramco are proponents of technology, developing, deploying and driving cutting edge innovation, not only because our main products, energy and chemicals are essential for the technology our world depends on, but because we recognize the immense power technology has to transform our own industry and the world”.

Al-Khowaiter stated that Aramco know well that this because technology has driven so much change over the last 100 years. He commented: “But, the advent of Artificial Intelligence and big data is taking us into a new world with almost limitless opportunity at a pace I don’t believe we have ever seen before”.

“For our business it is helping our environment, by improving sustainability. It is helping our people, by improving safety. And it is helping our customers, by improving reliability”, he said.

Moreover, Al-Khowaiter sees that reliability alone, in unplanned downtime and equipment failures cost industries across the world about $1 trillion globally. So that’s about equal to the GDP of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, roughly.

So new AI models allow Aramco and energy companies to predict the future health of equipment and minimize failures before they happen, as one small example. Not only does this mean increased equipment availability, but also reduced impact on the environment. So, our use of AI starts at exploration.

Aramco is using old seismic data, which it utilized in the past and reprocessing it with AI and the company is now able to generate new results from old data, which creates great savings.

“In production it means we can be more accurate and we are able to drive our drilling operations autonomously to be able to maximize production, reducing costs and reducing emissions”, Al-Khowaiter said.

“We have more than 90 years of propriety data from our extensive geological, seismic and process surveys and every day we collect information from 10 billion data points across our facilities, which goes straight to our engineering solutions center”.