Oil and gas companies must address fragmented data, manual records and weak digital integration before fully deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to improve production forecasting, profitability and investment decisions, an innovation expert has said.
   
Nadia Al-Banna of Cypher Crescent said companies needed to integrate operational data, technical knowledge and asset information to establish a reliable picture of their assets and improve production forecasts.

Speaking at the Energy Leadership Summit in Lagos, Al-Banna said the industry’s challenge was not simply acquiring AI tools but ensuring that the underlying data was accurate, accessible and available in real
time.

“The key to this problem that we have in oil and gas is integration. Integration of data, integration of knowledge and translating that intoprofitability, translating that into production forecasting based on a single source of truth,” she said.

According to her, many oil and gas operations still rely on manual and fragmented data systems, limiting the ability of companies to understand asset performance and make timely decisions.

“AI is a powerful tool. But we have to use it in a way that is most suitable to our data. Data right now in many of the locations is manual, not all collected in the same place, it’s quite fragmented,” she said.

She called for greater investment in data digitisation and infrastructure capable of transferring and communicating information in real time, saying AI could then be deployed for production optimisation and other operational applications.
   
Al-Banna also said integrated data could make oil and gas projects more bankable by giving investors clearer visibility into an asset’s financial prospects, risks, regulatory uncertainties and development
challenges.
   
She identified real-time production data, visualisation and digital twin technology as tools capable of improving visibility for operators and investors.
   
Meanwhile, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Platform Capital, Akintoye Akindele, said Nigeria should pursue a balanced energy transition by continuing to develop oil and gas while expanding solar,
wind, hydrogen and other energy sources.