Introduction Following the near-record turn-out for the OTC the previous week, turnout for the AAPG was disappointing. Many folks (including ourselves) were in Salt Lake City only a few months ago for the 2002 SEG – so there was noticeably less new ‘stuff’. The current political situation and SARS also contributed to a low turn-out of around 5000. We report from an interesting session on technology and trends in E&P. There was general agreement that technological innovation makes the oil world go round – but few can express clearly how to arbitrate between oil, service company and academic R&D funding.
We also report from what turned out to be a rather lack luster special session on visualization. Billed as a an interactive e-poster the format turned out to be the usual PowerPoint/lectern format. Surely a case for a VR theatre here – perhaps an opportunity for sponsorship?
On the exhibition floor we noted the following significant developments:
• Entry-level Visonarium from VizEverywhere
• SMT’s ‘PakNotes’ – post IT type ‘knowledge management’ add-on to the Kingdom Suite
• Impressive teleconferencing display from Teleportec on show at the AAPG booth
• On the distant horizon is the promise of ‘orders of magnitude’ improvement in seismic processing speed thanks to the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays.
The appearance of new seismic technology at the AAPG reflects the ongoing blurring of the boundary between geophysics and geology. 3D seismics and workstation visualization are the geologist’s principal tools today. This is backed up by a continuing growth in the amount of geophysics applied to geology. We have long considered that the AAPG has done a great job of stealing the geophysical ‘thunder’ from the SEG in the field of interpretation. Increasingly, the geophysical ‘takeover’ is extending into seismic processing. You are as likely to have an AAPG exhibitor talk of the latest wavelet processing or spectral deconvolution as about core analysis these days. This competence migration is not without risk. The delivery of specialist inversion and AVO tools direct to the geologist at the workstation is likely to hide a certain amount of ‘snake oil’. Another side effect is to move some significant pre-stack projects out of the seismic processing houses into smaller boutiques with specialist technologies.
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................................................1 Session on ‘Technology’...............................................................................................................................................................3
Shell E&P Technology John Darley..........................................................................................................................................3 Saudi Aramco – Abd Allah Al-Saif ............................................................................................................................................3 ExxonMobil – Kurt Rudolf.........................................................................................................................................................3 ChevronTexaco - Bob Laing......................................................................................................................................................3 Aberdeen University – Dave McDonald....................................................................................................................................4 Kansas Geological Survey – Lee Allison...................................................................................................................................4 Total – Thibaud Hughes Despointes..........................................................................................................................................4
Session on Visualization...............................................................................................................................................................5 Kerr McGee – Fanchen Kong ...................................................................................................................................................5 3D Salt Interpretation in ArcView – Mark Odegard .................................................................................................................5 3D borehole interpretation – Ted Bornemann (Schlumberger).................................................................................................5 Struct 3D - Platt River – Keele University ................................................................................................................................5 Saudi Aramco - Roger Sung ......................................................................................................................................................5
Exhibitors – what’s hot ................................................................................................................................................................5 VizEverywhere – ‘entry level’ visionarium................................................................................................................................5 New seismic ‘Hypercomputer’ for PSDM .................................................................................................................................6 Teleportec – high end videoconferencing..................................................................................................................................7 SMT’s PakNotes for Kingdom Suite ..........................................................................................................................................7
What’s new ...................................................................................................................................................................................8 Schlumberger resell Foster Findlay’s SBED.............................................................................................................................8 HRH Geological Services Gravitas Suite ..................................................................................................................................8 Schlumberger’s new fault tool ...................................................................................................................................................8 Trivision PowerCore .................................................................................................................................................................8 BakerHughes Direct web front-end for Recall database...........................................................................................................9 Landmark Graphics DecisionSpace DMS .................................................................................................................................9 Midland Valley 4d Vista ..........................................................................................................................................................10 A2d data accessible from Landmark applications...................................................................................................................10 New US consulting arm for Geovariances ..............................................................................................................................11 CoreLab Reservoir Information Browser ................................................................................................................................11 Austin Geomodeling new high volume seismic interpretation.................................................................................................11 Terrasciences – dipmeter and sonic waveform analysis..........................................................................................................12 GeoGraphix new cross section interpolator and montage tool ...............................................................................................13 Fusion Petroleum Technologies InSpect – spectral decomposition ........................................................................................14 Open Spirit Corp. Release 2.5 ................................................................................................................................................15 BGS Offshore GIS....................................................................................................................................................................15 IES PetroRisk Bayesian Probability Distribution....................................................................................................................16 Neuralog New Package – NDS Pro.........................................................................................................................................16 Geomechanics International – sand production prediction ....................................................................................................16 InfoPipe – land ownership mapping........................................................................................................................................16 Petrel Attribute Analysis..........................................................................................................................................................16 Rose Associates – ‘bias-free’ portfolio analysis......................................................................................................................16 CGM Larson Well Log Viewer ................................................................................................................................................17 EP-tech – fracture modeling....................................................................................................................................................18 Beicip – Themis 3D update......................................................................................................................................................18 RockSolid Images sand-shale attribute extraction. .................................................................................................................19 The Empire State Oil & Gas Information System....................................................................................................................20
Appendix 1 – Current Open Spirit Availability ......................................................................................................................21
Shell E&P Technology John Darley Darley’s thesis is that technology has been and will remain the enabler for finding and developing the world’s hydrocarbons for years to come – particularly to develop the 40-50 million barrels per day production which will be required around 2020. Renewables will only ‘get serious’ around 2050. The North Sea ‘Penguin’ fields were previously too small for economic development, but with new imagery, drilling techniques and long tie-back production facilities they are coming on stream. Darley sees a ‘dramatic take-up’ for mono-bore drilling – which Shell tested last year in Texas. Shell believes it gains competitive advantage from its in-house developed software packages. Shell’s ‘snake well’ technology was used to drill 1000m of horizontal reservoir in Brunei’s Iron Duke field – with a remarkable five individual completions in a single well – each managed as an individual producer. Solid expandable tubulars and internal control valves were the enablers. Darley described a smart field ‘value loop’ where data, assets, decisions, and models interplay. The same ‘loop’ applies at exploration, appraisal, development and production.
Saudi Aramco – Abd Allah Al-Saif Aramco develops technology in-house, through joint industry projects, consortia and academia. Aramco has spent an estimated $2 billion on data over the last 20 years. The Ghawar field has 90,000 km sq of 3D seismic, 6000 well logs and 800,000 feet of cores. Inhouse developed software includes a new seismic trace sort algorithm, fuzzy logic for deep gas well placement, DETECT (Aramco’s coherency package), fractal deconvolution etc. etc. Aramco has built a 27 million cell model over the Gahwar field which is simulated using Aramco’s ‘massively parallel’ POWERS simulator – a run takes 16 hours on a 4CPU PC cluster (10 million cells, 61 year history and 3400 wells). For Al-Saif, R&D collaboration between oils, service companies and academia is the way to go.
ExxonMobil – Kurt Rudolf ExxonMobil has 100TB of online data – half is ‘non seismic’ and represents the most rapidly growing segment. Rudolf advocates ‘collective enquiry’ by bringing people together in a 3D visualization and real time decision support environment. An example of ExxonMobil’s technology in action showed a movie of the geological evolution of the South Atlantic – with animation over 100 million years showing hydrocarbon maturation, migration, filling and spilling etc. Other focal points for ExxonMobil’s technology include ‘hidden play’ challenges – such as those obscured by shallow gas or salt overhang and lowside fault plays. For Rudolf, 4D reality has ‘caught up with the hype’! In the right settings, 4D can provide insights to the reservoir manager, which are not accessible from other direct forms of surveillance. Exploitation geochemistry and other techniques provide a ‘holistic understanding of the reservoir and its geological context. The future will see continuous monitoring of the reservoir with micro sensors, borehole instrumentation, micro gravity, passive and 4D seismics.
ChevronTexaco - Bob Laing Laing observes that oil and gas technology has some awkward aspects – it involves the management of a long and complex value chain and petroleum R&D offers little to other industries – ‘horizontal wells are not movies or medical’. On the other hand, customers are not prepared to overpay oil R&D – it is ‘cost plus’ rather than ‘added value’ – unlike for instance the IT business. The roles of oils, academia, service
companies and professional societies are ‘evolving’ – some1 think of this evolution as untenable, it is ‘just natural’. The last 15 years have seen a decline in proprietary R&D but this has been replaced with ‘leveraged R&D’. CTx creates value by managing R&D and by focusing on the white space – and hand-off – ‘it’s not how much you spend but where you spend it’. For instance – CTx seeks to build ‘fundamental platforms’ – such as GoCad – and believes ‘next generation’ technology will likely come out of large scale integration and the new simulator under development with Schlumberger. ‘R&D needs to be jointly owned by the entire business’. CTx currently focusing on Technology Rapid Execution (TREx) – here BP is cited as a benchmark performer. As an indicator of current industry focus, Laing did a keyword search on the 2003 AAPG CD which brought up around 150 papers each containing the words ‘research’, ‘deepwater’ and ‘integration’.
We spoke to Darley and Laing and pushed them as to the relevance of BP’s recent $ 15 million investment in a seismic processing supercomputer – and the relative decline of traditional research (eg palynology). How much in-house R&D is dilettante ‘futzing’ and how much focused on the business, how much could be done outside? Both agreed that arbitrating such opportunities is the heart of the matter, “making the right calls is the key and knowing when to stop can be hard”. CTC admitted that they have made bad calls in the past, throwing out key R&D efforts in downsizing.
Aberdeen University – Dave McDonald Who assesses the assessors of R&D. McDonald described the revolution that ‘Lord’ Oxborough’s review of geology research and teaching brought to the UK academic scene. Today, the Research Assessment Executive grades faculties and allocates funds. Increasingly academia is looking to industry funding with successes such as the BP institute for fluid flow in Cambridge and Herriott-Watt’s Genetic Units project. Quality has improved but few departments are fully funded.
Kansas Geological Survey – Lee Allison Allison described the ongoing effort to design and build the NSF’s National Cyberspace Infrastructure2. A component is Geo-informatics (geo is geography, not geology) – such as the national earthquake information system. Lots of activity digitizing paper and transcribing 9 track tapes to make data accessible over the web. Maps are created on demand from heterogeneous databases and served through an open source architecture. Learned journals such as the AAPG are aggregated3 and searchable online. Next focus is 4D – time based search and the semantic web. Applications include the Virtual Library of Congress, the Kansas Midcarb Search engine (CO2 production and sequestration) and QED – Query the Earth – a mock up of a 4D query system with sliders for sample collection date and geological age of sample. The GEMINI project offers online workspace, tools etc for DST data, decline curve analysis etc. in ASP mode. CHRONOS allows for distributed chronostratigraphy databases to be coordinated through a hub.
Total – Thibaud Hughes Despointes. Technology is motor for production growth and is required to assure Total’s objective of 5%/year growth. Challenges today are mature fields, extra heavy oil, deep offshore and acid gas. Seismic imaging is key in these areas. Other technologies include ‘bridge wells’, geostatistics, shallow analogues (a remarkable cartoon of turbidite deposition in the Niger delta), 4D seismics and Shell’s monobore well technology.
1 In San Ramone, ChevronTexaco’s own R&D HQ – we believe this to be an oblique reference to those who decry the ‘decline’ in R&D spend. 2 Echoes here of the US Government’s Information Superhighway vaporware of the 90’s? 3 Geoscience Electronic Journal Aggregate – over 40 journals.
Kerr McGee – Fanchen Kong An interesting presentation of state of the art seismic interpretation over the GOM US Grant prospect. Here shallow gas obscures the deep prospect and seismic attributes are less than perfect. The data nevertheless supported a detailed palinspastic reconstruction of salt canopy development and erosion. Voxel-tracking was used to extract channel fed lobes. Kerr McGee use Schlumberger’s GeoViz where prospect size and compute power allow. Otherwise Paradigm’s VoxelGeo is the tool of choice for voxel rendering and tracking. Data loading to VoxelGeo is an issue. Magic Earth is used for auto tracking top salt etc.
3D Salt Interpretation in ArcView – Mark Odegard Demonstrated use of MathLab and GeTech software to model gravity effect of salt and visualize in ESRI’s ArcView.
3D borehole interpretation – Ted Bornemann (Schlumberger) In the last decade, with the rise of 3D seismic interpretation, dipmeter analysis has declined. Incompatible data sets and highly deviated wells are partly responsible. But dipmeter information can help in areas of poor seismic data and/or high dip. Borneman described a Schlumberger product – StructView which iteratively models dipmeter data from a library of common structural types. The software was demonstrated with highly deviated well data from the Santa Barbara channel. Dip planes extracted through modeling can be exported as planar fragments into seismic workstations or reservoir models.
Struct 3D - Platt River – Keele University Research tools under development at Platt River and the University of Keele allow for structural restoration inversion of 3D seismic data. Regular seismic data can be stored as attribute maps or inverted sections and these can then be deformed back in time. This work is used in sequence stratigraphic interpretation. Forward modeling can also be performed to study for instance evolution of porosity under varying conditions of temperature and pressure throughout time. Much work has been done to minimize setup and automate the inversion process.
Saudi Aramco - Roger Sung IT is the underlying enabler in visualization, geosteering and collaboration. Saudi Aramco has four visualization centers equipped with SGI Onyx graphics super computers. The data volumes studied are impressive – the supergiant Gahwar field is 280 km x 70 km and is covered by 20 3D volumes totaling around 30GB of data per volume. Saudi Aramco has a plethora of in-house developed software for geobody extraction, well planning, pseudo logs etc. We questioned Sung as to Aramco’s but/build policy. He ventured that Aramco ‘has everything4’ from all the main software vendors. In house development focuses on niche software and leverages vendor applications.
Exhibitors – what’s hot
VizEverywhere – ‘entry level’ visionarium Described as the ‘affordable large screen visualization solution for the oil and gas industry, VizEverywhere was in use on the Petrel stand. VizEverywhere throws an SXGA (1280x1024) image onto
4 Sung mentioned Landmark, Schlumberger, GoCad, Insite etc.
a wide screen. Twin ‘matched’ projectors offer stereo with passive polarized specs. A complete system comes in a “under $100,000”. More from www.vizeverywhere.net. And [email protected].
New seismic ‘Hypercomputer’ for PSDM Tricon is planning to port its ‘Tsunami Suite’ pre-stack depth migration (PSDM) package to Starbridge’s field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based supercomputer. FPGA’s are configurable microprocessors whose internals can be ‘programmed’ to achieve specific tasks. Starbridge anticipates 100 fold speed up over conventional microprocessor-based machines. The Hypercomputer contains 62 million programmable gates which can be reconfigured during execution in under 40 milliseconds.
Starbridge claims a breakthrough in making FPGA programming accessible thanks to its Viva development environment. Viva is claimed to be the first integrated development environment for programming hardware. Tricon’s programmer is in the very early stages of getting to grips with the Viva dev kit so real-world seismic computing on Starbridge’s machine will be some time in coming. Starbridge uses XiLinx’s FPGAs.
Figure 2 Viva - a new programming paradigm from Starbridge.
More on PSDM from Gary Clark and developer Bill Kamps with www.essentialseismicsolutions.com. More on FPGA from www.tricongeophysics.com and Kimball Thomson.
Teleportec’s teleconferencing system offers a fairly lifelike image with a lot of ‘presence’. The display can be used at the end of a boardroom table – or on a conference lectern. The effect is quite impressive – way more convincing than conventional on-screen teleconferencing. What is particularly impressive is that the remote speaker can locate and engage with eye contact people in the local environment. The eyes really do follow you around the room! More from [email protected] and www.teleportec.com.
SMT’s PakNotes for Kingdom Suite SMY has introduced digital ‘Post-It!’ notes into its Kingdom Suite interpretation package.
PakNotes allow for comments and any Windows document to be attached to an interpretation object (seismic horizon, fault, well etc.). The PakNotes are stored along with the business object – and are accessible from other components of Kingdom Suite. PakNotes is the brainchild of SMT president Tom Smith. Smith believes that Windows-based document formats are likely to outlive most other ‘standards’ and that saving documents in their native Windows formats is most likely to preserve information assets over time6. More from www.seismicmicro.com and Tom Smith.
What’s new
Schlumberger resell Foster Findlay’s SBED Schlumberger’s GeoViz (at heart of GeoFrame – for displaying grids, surfaces, 2D/3D attributes, wells, cross sections) lacked tools for computing attributes – so an API was developed for GeoViz and Schlumberger did a deal with Foster Findlay to embed its image processing technology. FFA’s SEA 3D is now bundled with GeoViz and allows for voxel math, dip/azimuth processing, body labeling, thresholding etc. FFA belive that if you can see something to interpret it, then you can write a program to isolate it.
HRH Geological Services Gravitas Suite Gravitas is a bundle of HRH’s geological log drafting and visualization software made up of Winlog 5 for drafting, RepGen for daily reporting and the Windart real time data link. Gravitas development was sponsored by Total Fina Elf (now just Total again) and was redesigned to collect together the pre-merged companies best practices. The Windart module leverages the WITS data acquisition standard to collect real time data feeds and serve them to RepGen and Winlog for reporting and drafting. More from Dave Harrison and www.hrh.ltd.uk.
Schlumberger’s new fault tool New software due for release at the Stavanger EAGE, does automated fault picking in 3D seismic – à la Coherence Cube – seems to do a good job.
Trivision PowerCore Trivision has released PowerCore – a new component of its PowerSuite. PowerCore lets geologists capture all information relating to the coring process and present it in a WYSIWIG printable format. PowerCore includes multi-track pplotting for grain size, sedimentaryu structures, trace fossils etc. More from www.powerlogger.com and [email protected].
6 This is far from clear – as erstwhile WordPerfect users can testify!
BakerHughes Direct web front-end for Recall database
Figure 5 Baker Hughes ‘SuperView’ Recall web server7.
Baker Hughes has added a new ‘Super View’ front end to its Recall well log database. Recall has also maintained it position as core technology embedded within Landmark’s PetroBank data management system. More from Mike Rosenmeyer and www.totalrecall.cc.
Landmark Graphics DecisionSpace DMS
6 Decision Space DMS - Reserves, statistics and tornado plots.
Decision management software (DMS), the latest component of Landmark’s Decision Space suite, promises an integrated framework for risk-based decision support. As John Sherman explained a change in one parameter – such as the depth of an oil water contact – ripples through the system to ensure updated information in all modules. Risk is visualized with tornado and other plots which allow different
contributions to risk to be isolated and analyzed. The new software is backward compatible with Landmark and competitor’s products and links to other decision support tools such as Spotfire and Excel.
Figure 7 Pete Carragher explains BP's development strategy
Pete Carragher said that DMS was an example of BP’s technical strategy in action. BP works with core technology providers to embed in-house developed and specified tools into robust commercial products with a consistent look and feel. BP used DMS to assess various alternative scenarios on its UK Wytch Farm oilfield. Future developments will see the technology applied downstream to integrate pipeline modeling risks. DMS works on Windows XP and Linux. Carragher described BP’s working relationship with Landmark as supplying technology prototypes – ‘nuggets’ which were ‘fleshed out’ and deployed by Landmark. This allows BP to rapidly deploy its technology. Current ‘nugget’ development focuses on reservoir uncertainties – moving from a deterministic presentation of most likely outcome to a statistically determined range of possible outcomes. Tornado diagrams presenting a range of possible values are considered ‘better than a base case with no uncertainty’. We questioned Carragher as to whether BP put all its ‘nuggets’ into Landmark’s commercial offering. The answer was that most all BP nuggets go into Decision Space – although a few are kept in-house. Carragher believes that BP has more fields to manage than nuggets to keep in-house.
Midland Valley 4d Vista Restores serial 2D sections in multiple windows. Initially will offer visualization of reconstruction, next will become an integration platform for other tools. NMove provides ‘multi-threading’ views of the same model. A link to IES allows for passing models between the two environments. The software does not however do hydrocarbon geochemistry during reconstruction. Customers are asking for this but “the two approaches are quite different.” More from Ros Russell and www.mve.com.
A2d data accessible from Landmark applications. A2D’s Log line (‘e commerce before the dot com buzz’) now offers web services based remote calls from Landmark’s OpenWorks. A ‘subscriber’ could be a user, application or database A ‘Publisher’ - data application or ‘process’. The system offers GIS spatial data selection and data publishing to an internal PetroWeb intranet. Both Dot Net and Java client APIs are available and support business objects including well header, log attributes and e-commerce. Today, interaction with Open Works is by file transfer. A direct write link will be available real soon now. A2D’s database houses some 1.5 million logs. Landmark showed how A2D data cand be accessed from its Power Explorer desktop (developed from PetroBank Surf &Connect web edition and Landmark’s Open Explorer). From Power Explorer, users can drill down and compare OpenWorks and A2D logs before purchasing in TIF or LAS formats
from A2D’s LogLine plusservice. The development leverages ArcIMS and Map Objects Java. Richard Herrmann
New US consulting arm for Geovariances OGSI is the new US consulting arm of Geovariances reflecting a complex cross shareholding between Geovariances’ French and US units. While other modeling environments (such as Petrel or GoCad) have their own geostatistics built-in, these have limited functionality. For heavy duty geostatistics, data is exported to Isatis. A neat example of variogram based spatial filtering showed successive overprinting of tectonic grain. Jack Breig and www.geovariances.fr.
CoreLab Reservoir Information Browser A secure, password-protected website offers Corelab clients real-time access to data through an ASP browser. The Reservoir Inforrmation Browser was developed by Corelab’s reservoir services group - the ‘historical’
Figure 8 Core Lab Reservoir Information Browser8.
Corelab business unit. RIB offers management of rock samples, fluids, thin sections and clients can add their own stuff including office documents, jpegs and ‘clickable LAS’ logs for core description pop ups. Contact Fred Palumbo and www.corelab.com.
Austin Geomodeling new high volume seismic interpretation AGM has used SGI’s Volumizer (à la Magic Earth) to develop new 3D seismic display functionality for its Recon interpretation environment. Recon now integrates 3-D views of well log and seismic data with basemap and 2-D cross-section interpretation views and runs on SGI Onyx 2. AGM is working towards 200GB data volumes (next summer) allowing for ‘interpretation of the entire basin’. We saw a demo of ‘straddle slicing’ – strata based slicing and the neat opacity filtering of the new seismic tool. Interpretation changes in any window are immediately reflected in the other two views. Recon can read SEG-Y and SeisWorks formats. More from www.austingeo.com, www.sgi.com/industries/energy and Winston Norrish (AGM).
Terrasciences – dipmeter and sonic waveform analysis. Terrasciences has released two new modules (dipmeter and sonic waveform) in its TerraStation interpretation suite.
Figure 9 TerraSciences Dip Analysis Module9.
The new dipmeter module supports all dipmeter and imaging tools and loads LIS, DLIS and other formats from 4 and 6 arm tools. Output can be made to CGM, Postscript and other graphical formats. An OpenSpirit link is under development and the software is now available through the Petris Winds ASP hosting service.
Figure 10 Terrasciences' Sonic Wavform Processing module10.
The new sonic waveform module loads LIS and DLIS data and displays as wiggle or variable density. A variety of views of receiver data and computed slowness displays are available. Compressional, shear and stonely slowness can be calculated and synthetic seismograms and rock strength calculations performed. Terrasciences is also making its AutoDidge product available over the Petris ASP service. AutoDidge digitizes log data from scanned images in TIFF or BMP. The system has grid line removal and auto curve tracking. Digitized data can be output as LAS files. More from Andy Jagger and www.terrasciences.com.
GeoGraphix new cross section interpolator and montage tool GeoGraphix has incorporated two new modules in its geologically-focused interpretation suite. A new module prepares montages for presentation from a variety of sources and Geographics now sports a new 3D viewer.
Figure 11 Geographix's new cross section interpolator.
A cross section module interpolates log data and autofills cross sections with smeared log info – respecting conformities and faulting. In the next major release (June/July 2003) both seismics and logs will share the use the same database. Geographix uses ESRI MapObjects and Shapefiles. More from Dan Carson
Figure 12 InSpect - Spectral Decomposition (left) and original (right).11 Fusion Petroleum technologies is another company on the spectral decomposition bandwagon. Here a conventional seismic line (right) is shown with its 25hz spectral component (left). Fusion’s technique involves matching successive reflections with wavelets stored in a dictionary and is available as a service offering only – the technique has not been productized. More from www.fusiongeo.com and Mike Burnett.
Open Spirit Corp. Release 2.5 OpenSpirit Release 2.5 will be out in July – a pre release was on demonstration and is said to be 100 times faster thanks to a new ‘query by attribute’ function. The new release includes a data server for GoCad Voxets (3d properties) and 2d/ 3d seg y data management. A data selector with copy/sync utility, Excel adaptor and Arcview based GIS search will also be introduced. GoCad data support is augmented with XML files of units and coordinates. A new SEG Y Module includes a novel file-based storage data structure. A line is stored as a set of files – header, trace metadata, stack, wavelet and data etc. – all kept neatly in the same folder. The folders are amenable to simple storage as surveys, projects, and areas as required.
Figure 13 Open Spirit's augmented SEG-Y folder storage12.
Copy-sync utility moves data from project to project with on the fly coordinate transformation. The demo bombs – ‘this is beta code!’ Copy-sync functionality combines query and geographical selection through ArcMap. Export wells to foreign project. Seismic copy-sync is due ‘real soon now’. Other Open Spirit demos showed GeoFrame, OpenWorks, GoCad, Hampson-Russell, Stratamodel, ArcView, VoxelVision’s GigaViz and Open Spirit data viewers. Excel used to graph deviated wellbore. A new grid data exchange mechanism SGrid is due out later this year and will serve faulted grids in RESCUE and Petrel formats. Visualization will be through Petrel or in generic OpenSpirit 3D viewer. Release 2.5 will add new data stores (Linux OpenWorks and GeoFrame) possibly PPDM-based servers and maybe Kingdom Suite. New objects will include grids, ‘non-seismic’ horizons,etc. Also working on an Open Spirit .NET server.
BHP and Unocal are new Open Spirit users while Chevron is reported as ‘scaling down’ its number of licenses. See appendix 1 for current Open Spirit availability.
BGS Offshore GIS John McInnes – ArcView-based GIS model of N Sea bed – Passive Margin Modeling Project – showing impressive mega-slumps west of Shetland. BGS also offers geohazard risk assessment service.
IES PetroRisk Bayesian Probability Distribution IES’s new PetroRisk provides a risk management framework around IES products. PetroRisk will be marketed as an add-on to V8.013. PetroRisk assigns Bayesian probability distributions using Monte Carlo or ‘Latin Hypercube’. Risk is evaluated at all stages in the workflow from generation, maturation, migration, fill and spill.
IES V8.0 shipping this month. We queried Bjorn Wygrala on the integration of structural modeling with geochemistry. While the IFP is still working on a fully-coupled structural and geochemical basin model, IES is working with Midland Valley Exploration on ‘smoothing the workflow’ between IES and MVE with its TecLink. TecLink was developed for a consortium of companies including BG, Hydro, Unocal, ChevronTexaco and TFE. IES was showing a cool movie of a digitized sandbox experiment on a structural cross section from Sicily.
Neuralog New Package – NDS Pro NDS Pro bundles all Neuralog products ‘from scan to capture’. World TIF format – (WTF – ArcView format for registered TIF), Petra, Petris, ArcView – testing with GeoGraphics and SMT. Also new in Neuralog – deviated paths of raster images. More from Javan Meinwald and www.neuralog.com.
Geomechanics International – sand production prediction Release 5.1 of GMI’s geomechanical modeling software (due out ‘real soon now’) will include a bi-directional link with Landmark’ Open Works and a new sand production prediction module. Sand production uses finite difference modeling of sandstone plasticity to estimate maximum sand-free drawdown for given perforating designs and depletion scenarios. More from www.geomi.com and Lisa Dellangelo.
InfoPipe – land ownership mapping InfoPipe’s OwnerImage Builder takes input from sources including broker spreadsheets, Bureau of Land Management data and other land record systems. Land information is consolidated and can be output in Geoplus’ Petra, MapInfo, ESRI, AutoCAD and Geographix formats. OwnerImage Builder makes land management data accessible to workers in other divisions – notably exploration. More from InfoPipe and [email protected].
Petrel Attribute Analysis PetrelWorkflow (a ‘Schlumberger Product Group’) is augmenting its attribute analysis and geostatistical options. Starting from a seismic property volume Petrel can now apply user-defined Boolean logic and thresholding to extract and rank bodies. These can be color coded for size and the largest bodies selected for further analysis. We watched a demo which crashed during geostatistical correlation from log to seismic attributes. A fingers was pointed at the graphics card - a Wildcat 610. The demo started over – a laborious process – and went on to design well bore and create a synthetic porosity log along the well bore.
Rose Associates – ‘bias-free’ portfolio analysis Rose Associates is about to release a new Performance Tracking Data Base. The software is designed to ‘eliminate bias’ in portfolio analysis by allowing the comparison of current opportunities with corporate ‘memory’. Data is captured from Rose’s multi-mode risk analysis (MMRA) spreadsheets into a Microsoft Sequel Server database. Various plots of actual results vs. predicted estimates can be made. The database
13 See also EnergySciTech UK for risk evaluation in reservoir simulation.
is clamed to pinpoints bias, and provides the ability to track portfolio reserves and success rate prediction accuracy. Rose’s software leverages the Crystal Ball Excel add-in from Decisioneering, Inc. – used to make portfolio forecasts using Monte Carlo techniques. Rose’s Rocky Roden presented a paper in the Seismic Attributes special session on a study of drilling success on amplitude anomalies. The study covered 12 companies and 60 prospects in the US and international. The study probably provides more analysis that the small data set would appear to justify.
CGM Larson Well Log Viewer
Figure 14 Larson's web-based log viewer14.
Larson has released a new light-weight web-enabled well log viewing tool for access to real-time logging systems such as Halliburton’s INSITE wirelineMWD/LWD system. The system uses Tag Image File Format (TIF) and Larson’s CGM (including the CGP/PIP – Petroleum Industry Profile) to deliver well log data and drilling information over internet and extranets.
EP-tech is a Chinese-US joint venture specialized in extracting information about reservoir fracturing from seismic data. The image above illustrates the complexity of a fracture network.
EP Tech’s wavelet-based imaging technology uses log data and other pre-processing steps prior to spectral decomposition. More from Gary Robinson, Ahmed Ouenes and www.ep-t.com.
Beicip – Themis 3D update A new release of Beicip’s Temis 3D (version 2.3) has ‘solved a lot of issues’ and now integrates with MPath from Permedia. Temis 3D offers three ways of modeling hydrocarbon generation and migration as follows.
RockSolid Images sand-shale attribute extraction. Rock Solid Images and Magic Earth were showing the use of simultaneous multiple seismic attributes on some Seitel data from the Lake Theriot area in southern Louisiana.
Figure 18 Four Rock Solid Images attribute volumes displayed simultaneously17.
RSI applies a variety of techniques to estimate sand shale ratios from seismic data. Seismic attributes including, Variance of Angle, Time Variance of Instantaneous Frequency, and Variance of Similarity combine to form the “Shale Indicator,” a “hybrid” seismic attribute, that integrates certain depositional characteristics of shales, such as lateral continuity, thin-bed layering, and parallelism of bedding in an effort to seismically differentiate “seismic shales” from “seismic non-shales.” The Shale Indicator volume in the foreground depicts a sand-filled channel in the upthrown fault block in the foreground upthrown to the “blue” fault. Rock Solid Images also shares its technology with SMT Kindom Suite users via the Open Inventor platform. More from Uwe Strecker and www.rocksolidimages.com.
The Empire State Oil & Gas Information System The ESOGIS is claimed to be the gateway to exploration in the 21st century. ESOGIS is a data package for oil and gas companies planning to operate in New York State. The database-driven web application provides access to all of New York State’s well data. Various memberships are on offer from $5,000 per year for the ‘maintenance’ program to $20,000 for all historical data. More from [email protected] and [email protected].
17 Image courtesy Rock Solid Images and Magic Earth.
