The Spanish company will work to develop the world’s first cognitive tools aimed at improving technology for oil exploration and production. This will help to raise oil well yields.

The project will be carried out jointly by Repsol and IBM. This cutting edge technology will provide Repsol with a competitive advantage, given that the company will be able to improve yields from oil wells, as well as have access to more and better information in order to make strategic decisions.

The effort will take advantage of IBM’s pioneering Cognitive Environments Laboratory (CEL) in New York, which will work together with Repsol’s Center of Technology in Madrid.

Applying cognitive technology to the oil industry will allow for a material improvement in oil exploration and production productivity. This project will open the door for computers to understand, learn and reason about oil exploration and development.

The project, called Pegasus, was presented at IBM’s annual Cognitive Systems Colloquium, which took place at the company’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

The Spanish company has made over 50 oil discoveries since 2004, eight of which are among the world’s largest.

Repsol and IBM have a long history of collaboration, including internationally recognized exploration and production projects such as Kaleidoscope and Excalibur.