Unlock subsurface data

Challenge

The Energy industry has been collecting vast amounts of subsurface data for more than 50 years. Storing, retrieving, and analyzing this information across a variety of different formats and systems of record (tapes, large maps, long well logs, seismic sections, etc.) has proven to be a daunting challenge. Driving strategic decisions is often difficult because both the format and the locations of the data are not easily accessible and the processes for searching through the data are still often manual.

Impact

Exploration relies on precise, data-driven decisions due to the high costs of drilling. Low carbon businesses and new energy planning initiatives are looking to leverage legacy data, rather than acquiring new data. However, accessing and understanding this data is difficult. Legacy physical formats conflict with newer formats, and offsite storage and compatibility issues hinder analysis. As a result, companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover, manage, and analyze the treasure trove of subsurface and enterprise data they own.

What if you could

Access and analyze massive, distributed, and incongruent data sets to help your organization:

• Digitize disorganized and physically distanced information to speed analysis through automated AI pipelines and tools
• Drive operational efficiency for a more productive global workforce
• Reduce access time of legacy data using AI, driving better decision making

Iron Mountain Subsurface Data Discovery solution with Katalyst Data Management

The Subsurface Data Discovery solution, offered in partnership with Katalyst, provides access to dark legacy subsurface data by scanning paper logs and documents and transcribing seismic tapes, indexing the digitized assets via an enhanced Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) pipeline, and delivering the data on Katalyst’s iGlass portal, now enhanced with an AI assistant.

Digitize and reduce your footprint: Iron Mountain imaging centers in energy hubs worldwide operate with specialized equipment to digitize documents such as well logs, maps, and seismic sections, in large volumes. Katalyst offers a complete set of tape transcription and remastering services from bit-for-bit copy, reformatting, and demultiplexing of old legacy formats, to standard SEGY. By digitizing and transcribing your subsurface data archives, we help you reduce footprint and storage costs with defensible destruction.

Supercharge your legacy data: Integrated AI/ML processing pipeline in Iron Mountain InSight® Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is used to classify and extract metadata from legacy seismic reports, seismic sections, well reports, well logs, maps, and drawings, along with tape labels and EBCDIC headers compliant with PPDM taxonomies. Digital native unstructured content is processed in the same way. Reduce time, effort, and errors when organizing your digital content, ensuring consistency and governance across data types.

GenAI technology for the Geosciences: This solution leverages the latest genAI technology from leading providers to open the world of your subsurface data. Large Language Models (LLM) foundation models are fine-tuned to build the processors that classify images and extract key metadata in the asset enrichment process. The AI Assistant on Katalyst’s iGlass is purpose-built to interrogate datasets across all your subsurface legacy data assets.

Katalyst’s iGlass provides a rich map-based UI to search and inspect data across seismic, wells, and other project data. All your subsurface data is on one platform and ready to be discovered through a web-based ESRI map designed especially for managing subsurface data and Certified PPDM Gold Compliant.

Clear business benefits

Energy businesses can realize clear benefits by deploying the Iron Mountain Subsurface Data Discovery solution.

• Better visibility: Enable your organization to see all aspects of your subsurface domain. Regardless of the format or structure, your data can be pulled together to enable a much better understanding of the information that geoscientists need to analyze and identify hidden opportunities.
• Higher efficiency: Empower your teams to focus on value-adding tasks, rather than organizing data. Iron Mountain’s numerous high-speed scanning supercenters and secure chain of custody ensure your valuable data continues to be protected while being digitized and quality controlled. The enhanced AI/ML processing pipeline automates classification and metadata extraction from legacy records reducing the amount of manual work required during indexing.
• Improved decision making: Drive more revenue and savings by making more informed decisions about well, reservoir, and other subsurface elements to support your E&P and your low carbon and new energies initiatives. Replace guesswork and theory with action and results through a genAI-fueled search capability that opens new perspectives and delivers deeper results.

How Iron Mountain and Katalyst Data Management work together

Our strong alliances with industry-leading partners like Katalyst Data Management allow Iron Mountain to deliver a proven end-to-end solution for energy companies to re-use their dark legacy subsurface data as they transform and leverage the opportunities in asset consolidations and the energy transition.