Tuesday, 31 December, 2024 / Edition 39

It’s natural to be nostalgic this time of year. We have a built-in excuse to review how the year went and set goals for next year. Within Enspired, we’ve covered a lot of ground in the roughly nine months since our launch. Please indulge me in a walk down memory lane as we look back at trending tech topics and my own personal favorite articles.

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Upstream Energy Tech Trends From 2024

Stoatphoto/Shutterstock.com

2024 was a big year for energy technology. Nuclear fusion innovations exploded (not literally, thank goodness!), there were some groundbreaking oil and gas industry discoveries and innovations, and more. Let’s look back at some of the year’s noteworthy trends.

💧It’s in the water. Water is a big deal all around, but especially in our industry. We covered NAWI’s water plans in a four-part series, the last part of which is here.

🛢Innovative drilling, gold mining, and historic breakthroughs unearthed new insights.

• Chevron made the first discovery using 20k technology (which my colleague Shangyou Nie covered extensively here).

• A team with the International Ocean Discovery Program dug the deepest well ever drilled.

• Reclaimed Minerals Inc. examined a new method of extracting iodine, using basalt-enforced vessels.

• Satellite data combined with geophysical surveys and soil cores to examine potential locations for an old branch of the Nile River, which may have played a key role in transporting materials during the construction of the pyramids.

• And much of the same tech that geoscientists use in our work every day helped fuel the largest gold discovery to date.

☢️ Big tech invested in nuclear energy, and fusion tech took off.

• Microsoft entered a 20-year, $1.68-billion agreement with Constellation Energy to revamp Unit 1 at Three Mile Island. It plans to purchase all of the electricity that the plant will generate to power its data centers.

• Mayonnaise became a model to better understand nuclear fusion.

• German-American company Focused Energy announced plans to build a $65-million facility to begin using innovative fusion lasers.

• Several companies are making new headway in addressing the challenges of commercializing nuclear fusion energy (You can read more about this in my upcoming article in Explorer, which will be on Explorer.aapg.org tomorrow)
• Researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo believe a new heat-resistant alloy could be used in fusion reactors.

〽️ New technology is shaking up seismic research.

• Developers of a new method that uses elliptical symmetry claim it can accurately differentiate between an earthquake and an explosion 99 percent of the time.

•  Chevron teamed up with Eliis to develop and commercialize AI algorithms to improve geophysics workflows, including some work in automated fault detection.

• Shazam-inspired tech is using acoustics to identify tops in wells.

• Fiber technology has evolved from rarely used tech in science projects to something that could become more of a regular feature in monitoring hydraulic fracturing behavior to guide area best practices.

• I expect to hear more about quantum computing, especially given Google’s semi-recent announcement that its quantum chip Willow performed a calculation in five minutes that a standard supercomputing chip would have needed longer than the age of the universe to solve.

This is by no means an extensive list: New tech is being released every day!

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AI is the Front Runner

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Because you, as a geo, might have actually been under a rock this year (just kidding), you could have missed that AI—especially generative AI—was a hot topic. We covered it quite a bit in Enspired.

• Is AI the next dotcom bubble? The rest of the world might be adopting what oil and gas has maintained for a while: a quiet (or sometimes not-so-quiet) skepticism about what business value(s) AI can provide.

• The AI in your pocket. Our smart phones already have more tech in them than the tin bucket(s) we sent humans to the moon in, but like Tim Allen, our tech companies are pushing MORE (tech) POWER to your phones, and keeping up with the benefits and risks is key.

• AI enters her teenage years. SLB announced it had successfully drilled portions of five wells autonomously, improving drill times and other metrics. Is this the opposite of Skynet? Is this Groundnet? It feels like maybe it's Groundnet.

• Geoscience uses for AI. I honed in on some specific algorithms and their uses in geosciences, including central neural networks, which can help with fault detection and seismic inversions. We also looked at log applications like petrophysical parameter prediction and lithofacies categorization.

AI and machine learning will continue to advance, as will the tools that utilize each of them.

I appreciate each of you subscribing and reading my newsletters, and I get downright giddy when I get feedback from you all. Thank you! I’m excited to continue bringing you the latest and greatest in tech and innovation next year. Cheers!

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✉️ To get in touch with Sarah or suggest a topic for Enspired, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.