The amount of digital subsurface and geoscience data has grown exponentially over the past few decades with many companies and government organizations dealing with rapidly growing Petabyte-scales of data. On the other hand, hardware, storage solutions, technical applications and data management utilities have not kept up with these rapid developments. This has resulted in a big gap and hampers the use of AI and data-driven workflows in complex subsurface projects, be it in hydrocarbon exploration and development, geothermal energy projects, CCS, H2-exploration & storage and the search for nuclear waste sites, but also integrated scientific research programs.

The amount of digital subsurface and geoscience data has grown exponentially over the past few decades with many companies and government organizations dealing with rapidly growing Petabyte-scales of data. On the other hand, hardware, storage solutions, technical applications and data management utilities have not kept up with these rapid developments. This has resulted in a big gap and hampers the use of AI and data-driven workflows in complex subsurface projects, be it in hydrocarbon exploration and development, geothermal energy projects, CCS, H₂-exploration & storage and the search for nuclear waste sites, but also integrated scientific research programs.

The Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU^TM) project aims to address these critical challenges and has already resulted in fundamental changes to the way the energy industry approaches data management. OSDU^TM is a consortium with over 230 companies that pool their collective expertise in geoscience, software technology, data center and service industry backgrounds to address the above challenges via a common open-source, cloud-agnostic data platform. Government organizations, geological surveys and universities are also participating in the project. The main drivers behind geoscience data standardization and separating data from applications are the expected benefits for integration, simplification and automation of complex subsurface modelling and project workflows as well as the facilitation of a wealth of AI/ML opportunities enabled via the OSDU^TM data platform.

In 2022, the first productized version of the OSDU^TM platform-as-a-software (PaaS) solution became available for a variety of cloud providers, with many geoscience software developments already moving onto OSDU^TM. Georeferencing, data security and accessibility via API layers in the cloud are key features that ensure that the data is searchable, secure, sharable, and easily retrievable. The project is managed by the Open Group Organization and has generated not only a fully scalable geoscience data platform but also a new application ecosystem for geoscientists and engineers with many more expected benefits – which will result in a revolutionary change in how we deal with geoscience data and workflows.

This talk will demonstrate why subsurface data and the OSDU^TM data platform will play a critical role in the energy transition towards net zero emissions with the subsurface as a key component - even after the era of hydrocarbons.