I'm Jennifer Pallanich, the senior technology editor for Hart Energy Live, and I'm here at CERAWeek by S&P Global with Scott Sanderson of AWS [Amazon Web Services] to discuss the open subsurface data universe [OSDU].

Jennifer Pallanich, senior technology editor, Hart Energy: So what is the OSDU on AWS?

Scott Sanderson, director of global business development, energy and utilities, AWS: For 35 years, the biggest challenge they had in subsurface data management was [that] petrotechnical professionals spent up to 70% of their time just wrestling with the data and only 30% of their time actually doing petrotechnical modeling. That started as a consortium of operators, and to be honest, consortiums in oil and gas, you don't always give them a high probability of success. 

But those structures and the data catalogs and the architecture of it are being deployed and extended in a secure fashion throughout the energy value chain so that we can apply the same learnings and the same techniques to common data sets to finally leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, again, to accelerate those workflows and make the productive assets even more productive.

The other thing that's happening is software vendors—the traditional big ones, as well as innovative new, born-in-the cloud technologies—are being born strictly to operate on the OSDU platform. And so really breakthrough performance is being realized using these new technologies.

And that's Hart Energy Live’s Tech Trends with me, Jennifer Pallanich. Every Tuesday we'll have an episode drilling into the tech that fuels the oil patch at hartenergy.com/ep.