AI project makes analogue data treasures fit for the future of raw materials

Hanover/Steinitz. More than 100,000 documents from almost six decades of natural gas production from around 400 wells are stored at the natural gas production plant in Steinitz in Saxony-Anhalt. In order to tap into the geological knowledge from natural gas production for the planned lithium project, a specialised data science pipeline was developed in the KI project NAIAD, which transforms paper archives into a digital, searchable knowledge base.

"What used to take days or weeks of research in paper archives is now a targeted chat enquiry," explains Torsten Helbig, Lead Subsurface Data Engineering at Neptune Energy. "With NAIAD, our geologists can immediately access precise specialist information - from porosity and fracturing to material distribution. This turns the past into a digital tool for the raw material supply of the future."

In the specially developed data science pipeline, a modern vision-language model converts complex content such as images and tables from the scanned documents into searchable digital text using optical character recognition (OCR). The data is stored and made available on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The centrepiece is a GPT-supported chatbot that conducts targeted research in the digitised collections and answers specialist questions in natural language.

The Altmark is one of the most important natural gas fields in Europe and also offers potential for the domestic supply of lithium, a key raw material for batteries and electromobility. The existing infrastructure and the geological expertise built up over decades of natural gas extraction form the basis for structural change. With a proven lithium deposit of 43 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE), northern Saxony-Anhalt is home to one of the largest project-related lithium resources in the world.

"The lithium project depends on fast and well-founded decisions. This is where the AI-supported analysis of the Altmark data makes a clear contribution: better models, less uncertainty, faster planning. This gives us a concrete competitive advantage," adds Dr Axel Wenke, Director New Energy at Neptune Energy.

Neptune Energy is one of the leading raw materials companies in Germany. With over 135 years of experience, we secure supplies for industry and society. Our goal: Today we produce what counts tomorrow. Around 480 employees in many regions of Germany and at our headquarters in Hanover are involved in three key areas of activity

Base - Gas & Oil: safe and reliable production of domestic energy raw materials

Balance - Plugging and abandonment: taking responsibility for the past and restoring nature

Boost - New Energy: actively shaping the future, for example with lithium from Germany

This is how we combine experience with progress. Neptune Energy's revenue in the 2024 financial year was €440 million. The total annual production of gas and oil was 5.5 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe).