Shell's Perdido platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
It's one of the deepest floating oil and gas platforms
on the planet, but for 10 years, Perdido has struggled
with an engineering puzzle.
After this long to not have a resolution
this supremely frustrated.
It's subsea pumps are mysteriously
disrupted without warning.
Now, Shell are turning to a new solution to help solve
the problem, artificial intelligence.
8000 feet below the waves, lie Perdido pumps.
Key to production, they separate a mixture of oil
and gas that's sent to the surface.
But occasionally the pumps stop separating, causing a
complete loss of production.
It causes a lot of headache so we can solve this problem,
then we can be more proactive in trying to stop the event
before it happens.
At these depths, inspecting inside the
pumps is impractical.
Shell must find a different solution.
They're calling in a crack team.
Their mission, to predict partidos pump problems
using artificial intelligence.
Meet the data detectives.
I think what makes me a good detective is always being
skeptical of the assumptions.
We want to do well.
We want to find a possible solution through data science
if we have it.
Each pump generates a constant stream of data,
recording its temperature, pressure and chemical mix.
The data detectives plan to apply artificial intelligence
to sift through the gigabytes of stored data to search for
patterns which might predict when pumps fail, but it's
easier said than done.
We had such a humongous dataset that it's like finding a needle
in the haystack.
Three thousand tags, five years of data.
It's too much for the computer to process.
After weeks of work sifting through a decade of data,
their search draws a blank.
They wanted prediction, they wanted possible causes.
Sometimes people feel that artificial intelligence is
going to solve everything, and that's not really
the case.
Show me a sign that you're able to predict something for us.
It's research.
It just takes time.
But as the detective soon discover, it'll take more
than time alone to solve this mystery.
We had some early wins, some early successes, and then
it seemed like the progress plateaued.
There were times where I considered maybe we
should stop.
And at that moment, it didn't feel like we were progressing.
In a bid to break the impasse, the detectives call on the
experience of operator Jimmy Johnson.
Jimmy's worked in the oil industry for 25 years and his
knowledge of partidos pumps is second to none.
I said that you need to have individuals from the field
looking at this with you, because we understand
what this means.
When you're saying this is out of normal.
Tapping into Jimmy's knowledge, the team
refine their computer code and finally uncover what
they're looking for.
A telltale chemical signature seen in the data a few days
ahead of a pump disruption.
So, Vanessa, how far in advance did we see something on
this one?
It was about two days.
Two days!
Awesome.
Wow.
Is that something we can do?
Yeah, this is something that we can work with.
It wasn't until they showed off some of their results and I
felt that there was a sense of breakthrough,
that they were truly on the verge of
discovering something.
Continuing crunching through the data, the team's refined
algorithm identifies the chemical fingerprint ahead of
70 percent of pump disruptions.
Awesome.
Good work, guys.
Helping predict when a disruption event might occur,
means Perdido can avoid lost production, making even
the most skeptical appreciate the power of artificial
intelligence and the work of the data detectives.
It took the results kind of hitting me in the
face multiple times.
You can't deny the results.
A treisman in me says Nobody's going to know this
machine better myself.
The realism of that is that's not always true.
Once you start seeing the results,
there's no refuting numbers.
That's the beauty about math, right?
I mean, math is math.
If we're able to tap into that, we can truly succeed
and make this company a more successful place to work.