Dr. Shahin Jamali
Head of Monitoring and Artificial Intelligence, Fraunhofer IEG.
Dr. Shahin Jamali is the Coordinator for the OptiDrill project and the head of the Monitoring and Artificial intelligence department at Fraunhofer IEG. He has worked on novel monitoring systems, including Acoustic Emission technology for innovative, future contact-free drilling processes and lately, his main focus is on the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in energy and geothermal applications. Find out more about the OptiDrill project goals, progress, challenges, and next planned activities from Dr. Sahin Jamali.
What are the main goals for the OptiDrill project?
The geothermal drilling industry faces multiple challenges for successfully exploiting the vast amount of geothermal energy within the earth. These problems include poor overall drilling performance, lack of bottom hole awareness, and time-consuming and very costly non-productive-times (NPT). OptiDrill project revolves around the idea to address and solve such problems encountered in drilling based on a combination of enhanced monitoring systems and multiple data-driven AI-based methods, each being responsible for either analysis, prediction, or optimization of one aspect of drilling or completion process.
What has been achieved during the first 9 months of the project?
- The initial phases of the project have mainly been focused on two main aspects.
- The first aspect has been the finalisation and design of the novel OptiDrill monitoring system based on the deep geothermal drilling industry requirements.
- In parallel, there has been an extensive effort from all the partners to participate in creating historical drilling and wellbore databases from all around Europe to enable the efficient development of AI-based solutions.
- The development of the drilling performance prediction and optimisation module of the OptiDrill advisor has also seen a significant leap in the past two months.
During these 9 months, what are the challenges that you have faced?
- The most challenging aspect during the past months, as it is for most AI-based solutions, has been gathering, creating, and curating of the database.
- There is a great need for collaboration between all partners, understanding the privacy and confidentiality needs, and ultimately coordination of such requirements under an umbrella of a unified system.
What are the next planned activities for the OptiDrill project?
- The next planned steps for the OptiDrill project is to initiate further possibilities to acquire more well and drilling databases. This is rather a crucial aspect in defining our success. We are in talks with multiple public entities within the EU to expand our reach.
- We will be also extensively continuing to develop our AI models further.
- The Fraunhofer IEG IBOGS system will be also prepared. It will be used to integrate the novel measurement methods to conduct the required experiments to fill the gaps in the historical data and create scenarios that are not available through the available datasets.
