CALGARY – Haul trucks, shovels, pumps and pipes are common sights at Imperial Oil’s vast oilsands operations in northeastern Alberta, but so too are robots and drones, with generative artificial intelligence a newer addition to the technological mix.
“We’ve been laser-focused on this digital journey since 2018,” Cheryl Gomez-Smith, the senior executive in charge of Imperial’s production, told a recent investor conference.
Gomez-Smith said as of last year, Imperial’s bottom line has seen a $700-million boost from high-tech initiatives — and that’s on track to rise to $1.2 billion by 2027. The company has an in-house team dedicated to ramping up new technologies, and also draws on expertise from its U.S. majority owner ExxonMobil Corp.
For the past few years, Imperial has been using self-driving haul trucks at its Kearl oilsands mine. It has also enlisted Spot, a four-legged robot developed by Boston Dynamics that bears an eerie resemblance to a dog, for routine inspections and maintenance at Cold Lake, an oilsands site in eastern Alberta that uses steam wells to extract bitumen.
“We estimate Spot can conduct almost 70 per cent of some operator rounds, allowing us to reallocate operator and maintenance resources to higher value work,” said Gomez-Smith.
“We currently have two Spots at site. We have two more inbound for delivery at this quarter, so we’re well on our way to having a litter.”
Imperial is building on those advancements by expanding into generative AI, Gomez-Smith said.
“This is where we’re chatting with our own data to allow operations to gain real-time insights to drive better and faster decisions.”
At Cold Lake, remote piloted drones are helping save money on maintenance and they’re on the brink of being AI-enabled. Sensors with AI capabilities are also helping automate pumpjack speed at the site in order to boost efficiency.
Shannon Wilson, who leads the energy division at IBM Canada, said the oil and gas industry has been using automation for a long time and it’s beginning to “take it to the next level” by incorporating AI.
In addition to bolstering automation already on site, Wilson said AI is being used to improve productivity by quickly sifting through or compiling reams of information — tasks that would have otherwise been time consuming for workers. It’s also been helpful in monitoring operations and better planning maintenance activities, reducing downtime.
Larger companies have the scale to invest in their own in-house technology, while smaller ones are taking advantage of commercial offerings, Wilson said.
“There’s creativity happening in the marketplace and they’re buying the embedded solutions from some of their existing service providers.”
Wilson called AI a tool to “augment” human intelligence.
“Ultimately, humans are the decision-makers,” she said. “The more repeatable a process is, the more AI can lend itself.”
Another one of the country’s energy majors, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., says in a 2022 report that in its international operations, which include offshore platforms in the U.K. and Cote d’Ivoire, it has used “a suite of artificial intelligence tools” to track its greenhouse gas emissions data.
“This data allows us to identify production anomalies in real-time that could be causing emissions fluctuations,” it said.
Fellow oilsands giant Suncor Energy Inc. also has a fleet of autonomous trucks, and said in a 2023 website post that it had begun incorporating AI into the dispatching system at its Mildred Lake mine. It said human dispatchers still work around the clock, but AI handles straightforward tasks like assigning trucks to dump stations and directing them to refuelling stations.
While many information technology pros are looking for ways that AI can be a benefit to businesses, others are focused on the darker side — helping companies protect themselves from cyberattacks.
The 2025 IBM X-Force Threat Index released last month said the global energy sector accounted for 10 per cent of the attacks its cybersecurity teams responded to in 2024.
“The critical importance of energy infrastructure to global operations and its susceptibility to disruption makes it a persistent focus for attackers,” the report said.
Tyler Williams, EY Canada’s cybersecurity leader for industrials and energy, said the threat landscape is evolving quickly and the industry is doing its best to keep up.
Attacks have become so advanced that they can be launched autonomously via AI in seconds, wreaking the kind of havoc that a few years ago would have taken millions of dollars and specialized expertise to pull off, he said.
“It’s a bit of a scary environment,” Williams said.
Companies need to counter AI threats with their own technology that’s as advanced or better, he said.
“I think everyone is attentive to it. They’re not unaware of the problem. There’s not really a lack of ambition or investment that I’ve seen in the sector, particularly in oil and gas,” Williams said.
Standards bodies are working to come up with guidance, Williams said, “but I think most companies would consider themselves quite on their own to come up with frameworks and controls to make sure that technology gets deployed securely.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 11, 2025.
Companies in this story: (TSX: IMO TSX:CNQ, TSX:SU)
