Blue skies innovation
Basic research (or blue skies research) may be defined as research to understand the basic mechanisms of nature. Such research is often regarded as curiosity driven and defined by scientists.
We built an AI tool to help avoid environmental disasters
Artificial intelligence helps us more and more with decision-making in fields such as medicine, transportation, and information retrieval. In collaboration with Equinor, Norway’s biggest oil and gas company, we have now added another field to the list: Interpreting integrity logs from oil and gas wells. Together, we built an AI-based assistant for Equinor’s log interpreters that they are now using in their daily work.
The health of petroleum wells
How do you check that a petroleum well is leak-proof, so that it cannot endanger the environment or the platform staff? To do so, you’d have to investigate a narrow hole with a diameter of maybe 30 cm, kilometers below the ground, where the temperatures can reach well above 100°C and the pressure is crushing. This may sound difficult, and it is! Even so, the petroleum industry has been doing things like these for almost a century, and over the past four decades they have increasingly been using ultrasonic techniques.