After three years of working together, APA Corp. - parent of Apache Corp. - and Palantir Technologies have expanded their partnership, announcing a multi-year, multimillion-dollar extension to their enterprise agreement.
Not only does this new agreement expand on the work deployed across APA's global portfolio, it introduces new artificial intelligence capabilities with Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) software.
The partnership has been extended for four years, according to Matt Babin, Palantir's head of energy and natural resources. He said the company had had an exclusive arrangement with BP until 2020, when it began working with other companies, including APA.
"By leveraging artificial intelligence, Apache can more accurately monitor, analyze and report emissions data, optimize supply chain logistics, and make better informed decisions about reservoir management, ultimately enhancing operational efficiency and sustainability. Apache's partnership with Palantir underscores the company's commitment to utilizing AI to help solve critical operational challenges," Travis Osborne, Apache's vice president and chief information officer, told the Reporter-Telegram.
Babin told the Reporter-Telegram the company's platform allows the user to cover the entire supply chain or to narrow it to specifics, such as one well or a fleet of compressors.
The software has been used in applications as varied as operational planning, supply chain management, maintenance planning, production optimization, and contract management.
"We released AIP about 18 months ago, last summer," Babin said. "The idea was we built the software to harness models long-term. We built out the nouns and verbs of the business - well pads, wells, stations, trucks, facilities, gathering stations - so it could schedule trucks or see the battery levels at a well."
The platform enables customers to leverage everything in the model but constrains them using ontology languages, which are used in artificial intelligence and computer science to allow for the specification of classes, properties, and restrictions, and often include reasoning rules to support knowledge processing.
"AIP will decode a question and answer it based on training data," Babin explained. "If you ask which wells in the Permian Basin are producing lower than expected, lower than production models, AIP knows product levels. We can create an AIP agent to look at well deviation and create a schedule to look at those wells."
For all that capability, Babin said humans are the most important part of the equation.
"Where I see AI used well is when people say 'This is what I want to do differently,' use AI to generate better results, improve margins, improve lifting costs. Where AI doesn't go well is when people look at the technology first and hope it goes well," he said.
"(No engineer) I've met has made decisions on a well because a machine told him to," he added.
The growth of data centers and their need for power makes oil and gas even more important, he said.
The company was founded to work with intelligence and defense and has been working in the energy sector about 10 years, Babin said. Besides APA, he said Palantir has worked with ExxonMobil and Kinder Morgan, among others.
As nice as it is to announce new clients, "I'm more excited to announce renewals," he said. "The best referral is an existing customer's renewal."