No one can even say with any certainty how much oil is waiting to hit the market. The startup Orbital Insight thinks it can answer those questions by analyzing satellite photos.

Founder Jimi Crawford—an AI expert who has worked for NASA and Google—explains that it can do this by analyzing massive numbers of photos of oil tanks with floating lids. As a tank is depleted, the lid sinks, and the sun casts shadows on the inside of the tank changes. By detecting patterns in how those shadows change, analysts can estimate how much oil is available in all the tanks it monitors.

To spot these patterns, the company uses some of the same artificial intelligence techniques Facebook and Google use to analyze photos.