DeSmog review: Big Oil uses AI to find more oil and gas

The article frames this as a collision between two forces UN Secretary-General António Guterres called defining challenges: Big Oil and artificial intelligence. His warning, that the danger is technology without accountability, sets up the piece's central tension: the tech companies supplying AI to fossil fuel producers are not generally held responsible for the extra production and emissions those tools may enable.

Just two years ago, fossil fuels' share of world energy supply was projected to decline. That changed as AI data centers expanded rapidly, feeding an argument that fossil fuels must also scale up. Natural gas now supplies more than 40% of the power used by U.S. data centers, according to the IEA, and Chevron CEO Mike Wirth has said AI's advance depends on the gas fields of the Permian Basin as much as Silicon Valley.

Industry examples cited in the piece show the mechanism. Equinor re-scanned the Norwegian continental shelf with AI, yielding 27 new discoveries, and saved $130 million last year. Chevron said it improved drilling and fracking efficiency in the Permian Basin by over 30%. Exxon's 2019 Microsoft partnership aimed to add up to 50,000 oil-equivalent barrels a day by 2025. The stakes hinge on whether tech providers like Microsoft, which did not confirm its Exxon partnership is still active, accept responsibility for these downstream effects, and on whether oil majors' weakened net zero timelines invite new scrutiny as their AI-driven output grows.