Vicki Hollub ran operations in the Permian basin for Oxy before becoming CEO. She posed for Forbes in 2017.

Occidental Petroleum’s conventional oilfields in the Permian basin of west Texas have been producing for decades. And although output has slowed, there remains 2 billion barrels of oil still trapped thousands of feet below the surface. Engineers have figured out several methods over the years to scour out stubborn oil from nooks and crannies in the reservoir rock (think of a sponge but with much tighter pore spaces). One involves strategically injecting water below the level of the oil in order to flush it out. When that doesn’t work they shift to injecting steam, which further softens up stubborn crude oil. After that, they turn to an even more effective solvent: carbon dioxide.

Chief Executive Vicki Hollub said last week that Occidental Petroleum engineers are using artificial intelligence to build digital twins of these oilfields — feeding them millions of datapoints from thousands of sensors in order to design and simulate more effective strategies to help permanently inject the maximum amount of CO2 while extracting what will effectively be “net-zero-carbon” petroleum.

Hollub — speaking at a conference organized by the Harold Hamm Institute for American Energy at Oklahoma State University in Oklahoma City — said that CO2 molecules are proven to be more effective than steam at scouring oil out of the........

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