AI can boost oil production-Huawei

According to Huawei, cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence can help Nigeria and other oil and gas-producing countries increase oil production, manage energy transition more efficiently, and recover quickly from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chief Technical Officer of Huawei for South Africa, Matamela Mashau, said this at a roundtable on the sidelines of the recently concluded MWC Technology Summit in Barcelona, Spain.

The side event, themed “MWC Media Roundtable Briefing (Oil & Gas),” was organised by Huawei, a leading global technology and equipment provider, to showcase its oil & gas solutions to industry stakeholders.

The event had in attendance other speakers, which included Yumna Audu, Head of Business and Information Technology from Nigeria’s NLNG and Sana Lallali from Sonatrach, among others.

Huawei CTO, Mashau, in his presentation, said digital and intelligent technologies were becoming the forces that drove the transformation of the oil and gas sector.

He told stakeholders that the use of distributed fibre sensing and AI technologies was ideal for buried pipelines that are impossible for manual or drone inspection.

According to reports, COVID-19 had a significant impact on the extractive industry. In 2020, the epidemic had a significant effect on the world economy during its wave, which led to a historic decline in oil demand and, as a result, a sharp decline in oil prices to just above $20, the lowest levels in decades.

At the MWC media roundtable, the summit disclosed that Sonatrach and Huawei collaborated to build a joint innovation centre that produced the smart oil and gas pipeline inspection solution, which it said aims at further strengthening oil exploration in Nigeria.

This solution, according to Mashau and Sana Lallali, Managers of the Sonatrach Joint Innovation Centre, uses cutting-edge technologies to minimise operations and maintenance costs, proactively alert pipeline deterioration, and promptly find fibre cuts.

Punch