What is Advanced Data Analytics

I have been attempting in oil and gas to educate and describe advanced data analytics for the past five years. The understanding is usually based on the individual's experiential learning and academic education. For example, Dr. Lev Tabarovsky, Technology Fellow at Baker Hughes further enhanced my thinking.

During a recent conversation with a colleague who was my manager at Baker Hughes as well, Dr. Mario Ruscev, currently the Global President of Products at Weatherford, he articulated probably one of the best descriptions I like to share:

"It has become very fashionable to also discuss Analytics use in the E&P world lately. Analytics are really a set of algorithms that empirically define and/or find relations, distances, similarities between multiple variables and/or dimensions events and allow you then to obtain responses when physically derived models cannot be done or struggle. Plugging data into Predix or Watson and expecting an answer does not really work. First you need to define what question you want to answer, then you know your events and get together a set of mathematicians and subject matter experts to find the type of algorithms that will work and optimize your solution if one is found. Instead of using a closed eco system like Predix or Watson we rather form a small team of Data Scientists (in the old days we called them theoretical scientists) to develop the solutions."

Excellent!

Solar cost trends

Good friend Dr. Chris Wedding forwards an excellent analysis of solar industry and the growth of solar.  Growth of solar to me is not how much upside there is for the investor but how cheap the energy use is for the consumer (see graph below). The article is more directed towards ROI for investors.

Enjoy the article here.

Ofcourse the recent allocation of $1B by Mr. Bill Gates and his co-directors (including Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, former energy hedge fund manager John Arnold, and SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner) towards clean energy has been in the news with Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Energy investments have not been successful because the standard model of Silicon Valley mindset based investment returns do not occur in the short timeframes nor the standard software style business models apply.  I was delighted to read the following from John Arnold:

"“Being a 20-year fund with patient capital that’s not needing short-term gains allows us to have a longer-term outlook as well as fund technologies that don’t fit into the traditional VC model as it exists today,” says Arnold."

Read the complete article at Quartz here.