SEG 2018: Opportunity Is Ripe For Digital Transformation

While oil and gas demand in the developed world will level out or even decline, developing countries will offset this decline, and in the near term it’s estimated that less than 25% of this demand will be met by renewables. Water scarcity is also an issue, and programs like Geoscientists without Borders are helping use geoscience skills to combat these problems. Overall, the society has 58 committees furthering the advancement of geophysics.

Darryl Willis, vice president, oil gas and energy at Google Cloud, was the morning’s keynote. His message was simple—“The cost of the status quo: Get on board or get left behind.” Willis maintained that the industry can’t afford to be left behind in the digital transformation.

This assertion might amuse geophysicists who have waited for years for computers to catch up with their processing and interpretation theories. But now that AI, ML and neural networks are more than theories themselves, the industry needs to respond nimbly to the new promise, something it hasn’t always proved adept at.