Rockwash Geodata Ltd, an industry leading geological laboratory and services company, has announced a collaboration agreement with analytics and machine learning company Earth Science Analytics (ESA). The partnership will combine technical expertise and industry leading software, to transform vast quantities of dormant oil and gas data into high value digital assets.

Having long been overlooked and stored in geological core repositories, many drill cutting samples remain accessible only through physical visitation with many often unwashed and coated in drilling fluids. As a pioneer in the field of national cuttings digitalisation, Rockwash Geodata has brought these important geological resources into the digital environment. With an emphasis on the collection of repeatable data from every sample in every well, many thousands of data points are gathered throughout the entire stratigraphic section, generating an excellent candidate dataset for computer-driven deep learning techniques.

The new collaboration will combine ESA’s web-based cloud-native geoscience software and Rockwash’s geological expertise. In the first project under this partnership, Rockwash Geodata experts have taken a proprietary database of cuttings photographs and, using ML workflows from ESA, categorized the photos in terms of bulk lithology to create a fully labelled dataset of cuttings sample photographs.

By combining these newly created digital inputs with a quality assured set of traditional log suite curves prepared by ESA, they have generated a set of high-quality rock property predictions which can be used to build larger, reservoir-scale interpretations. This will support petrophysical and geoscience workflows by providing another layer of understanding and confidence to the rock property predictions.

Jack Cawthorne, Co-director of Rockwash Geodata Ltd, said: “We have spent several years fighting the corner for cuttings as a crucial geological resource that are undervalued and have refined our procedures to ensure our data is produced as consistently as possible.

“Now that there is some momentum building behind the concept of digitalisation of large cuttings archives, we are thrilled to be partnering with Earth Science Analytics to create yet more value from AI-ready digital cuttings data for geoscientists working across a variety of subsurface sectors.”

Tatiana Moguchaya, CEO at Earth Science Analytics, said: “This collaboration paves the way for the practical application of cuttings data in daily sub surface workflows by demonstrating how the value of these, quite literally, tiny fragments of data, can be unlocked when augmented with Machine Learning techniques.

“The activity will support a well cuttings scale interpretation workflow that is essential for good business decision making, not only in oil and gas exploration, but also for sub-surface CO₂ storage and mining industries. We have already identified a broad scale of application areas, where this technology will enable and accelerate the industrial digital transformation, as an opening up for new business opportunities.”