According to Rystad Energy’s Jon Marsh Duesund, Partner, Advisory, and Andreas Bakke Moan, Project Manager, Advisory, the value of $500 billion between 2026 and 2030 is captured through cost reductions from more efficient operations, production increases from higher uptime and increased recovery, and compressed development timelines.
While pointing out that cost reductions and production increases are the largest value pools and contribute roughly equally through 2030, the company underlines that E&P players, which are currently investing in digital and AI, are expected to capture an additional value of $80 billion per annum in 2030 compared to 2025.
The energy market intelligence group emphasized: “The returns are already visible in the industry. ADNOC reported $500 million in AI-driven value already in 2023, and the UAE state giant has committed $1.5 billion in digital capital expenditure targeting $1 billion in annual value creation.
“Norway’s Equinor generated around $200 million in AI-related savings between 2021 and 2024, before reporting $130 million in 2025 alone. The trajectory is not linear. Digital value creation follows a compounding curve as adoption increases and organizational capabilities mature.”
Based on Rystad’s estimates, the $500 billion value creation opportunity in upstream oil and gas sits across four main workflow categories, encompassing asset development and operations and maintenance, which relate mostly to surface workflows, and exploration and reservoir development alongside drilling, wells, and production, representing subsurface-focused workflows.
The firm elaborated: “Each is at a different stage of digital maturity. Historically, operators have deployed a wide range of digital tools into various workflows, especially within exploration and reservoir development. When it comes to newer deployments, operations and maintenance is seeing more rapid adoption, primarily through predictive maintenance and remote operations delivering double-digit cost reductions at leading operators.
“Subsurface workflows hold the largest untapped value potential, especially from getting more volumes out of the ground and reducing drilling costs. Several operators have, for instance, compressed seismic interpretation timelines from months to around 10 days and the next step is to transfer this increased reservoir knowledge into real value.”