Why we should embrace openness
Openness—open ideas, open data, open teams—can help us build more competitive, higher performing, more sutainable organizations in this industry.
Last week I took this message to the annual convention of the three big applied geoscience organizations in Canada: the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists (CSPG), the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicist (CSEG), and the Canadian Well Logging Society (CWLS). Evan and I attended the conference as scientists, but also experimented a bit with live tweeting and event blogging.
The talk was a generalization of the talk I did in March about open source software in geoscience. I wasn't sure at all how it would go over, and spent most of the morning sitting in technical talks fretting about how flaky and meta my talk would sound. But it went quite well, and at least served as some light relief from the erudition in the rest of the agenda. It was certainly fun to give an opinion-filled talk, and it started plenty of conversations afterwards.
You can access a PDF of the visuals, with commentary, from the thumbnail (left).
What do you think? Is a competitive, secretive industry like oil and gas capable of seeing value in openness? Might regulators eventually force us to share more as the resources society demands become scarcer? Or are we doomed to more mistrust and secrecy as oil and gas become more expensive to produce?
← Click the image for the PDF (6.8M)
Matt Hall
If you have 8 minutes to spare, you might prefer to watch and listen to an abridged version of this talk on our new YouTube channel. Given that I love presenting, I found making this little video surprisingly hard, having to pause and cringe at my voice and mannerisms every few minutes. I was aiming for about 4 minutes or so, but apparently I have issues with verbosity! I am also finding that Google's automatic transcription service is very cool... but not all that good at deciphering my accent. Here's my surreal auto-transcription alter-ego talking about interpretation tools:
...like the madagascar assaultive person school GMT from acting begins the most of the cold frames like thomas man's insect like pie for example.
Reader Comments (8)
Great talk, even just quickly skimming through it. I think you'll eventually win the day with this argument, but it will probably take a while. You might have to chip away incrementally and for a long time ... but then you'll be a pioneer :)
Thanks for hook-up to that opendtect.org portal, might take a look and see if anything interesting in there for strat research projects.
It is not often that I have the pleasure of getting truly energized by a talk, but yours got me thinking in entirely new directions about several projects that I am currently working on. As an academic, the ability to interrogate source code is a critical element of maintaining credibility in processed data so I will be taking a long, hard look at many open-source software options over the coming months.
The broader issue of openness in the oil and gas industry (or at least in the petroleum geoscience aspects of exploration and development) deserve much more consideration, and I agree with Brian's comment that this might be an uphill battle. The benefits of victory in this battle, however, are re-ignition of the innovation that drove early successes in finding and developing vital energy supplies. Faced with the combined challenges of reduced mentorship of young petroleum geoscientists along with the shift to exploiting much more heterogeneous reservoirs with less mobile fluids, I think we need all the constructive debate that openness may be able to provoke.
Nice talk (and post) Matt. I don't think this is going to happen though, not in my lifetime.
@Brian: Chipping away is what I do best! Do check out the F3 dataset — it's not perfect, but it has a nice set of strongly prograding clinoforms. Academia seems to have lots of these fairly shallow 3D seismic volumes, but seems starved of data from deeper prospective zones and in some plays like the Athabasca of Alberta, and shales.
@Burns: I'm really glad you enjoyed the talk — it was great to meet you at the conference. I love the idea that openness, instead of being a threat, can instead be addictive because of the benefits it brings. The really interesting thing is that I think the greatest benefits (faster innovation and iteration) will come to the early adopters (as usual).
@Mihaela: LOL — there are at least a couple of ways to interpret that remark!
Everyone should read Steven Johnson's "Where Good Ideas Come From". He makes a compelling case for how openness has led to innovation over the past few centuries. Essentially, he's saying the trend to make everything a trade secret, patent, copyright, etc. stifles innovation.
It will take a long time for any industry, including energy E&P, to break out of that frame. Companies are essentially run by lawyers now, whether they produce software or oil.
The last talk on Wednesday that I attended was by Steve Larter "Shalegas, Tight Oil and /bitumen, Unconventional Problems Need a New Approach to Innovation and Technology Development".... he was kind of singing from the same songbook around innovation that's required in Alberta's future (but you can put your province of choice in here). That was after he had completely depressed me by pointing out how "bad" our industry (and even our country) is at investment in R&D (relatively miniscule), then how inefficient our educational institutions are from an R&D perspective (using PhDs and patents produced as R&D proxies) compared to similar instituions in the US, then how little value in new technology Calgary and Edmonton generate compared to Silicon Valley (all 3 having the same population size).
The bright side of the story is that we have a well educated population and many 'resources' to bring to the challenge. What Dr. Larter felt we needed is (i) an Integrated Energy Plan and Execution Strategy (to 'focus' our resources much better) and (ii) a Canadian 'Manhattan project' to bring the intensity and co-operation into play. He echoed some of the themes in the recent Emerson report (http://www.premier.alberta.ca/plansinitiatives/economic/Emerson%20speaking%20notes%20for%20handout.pdf ) produced for the government of Alberta.
I think your 'openness' theme would resonate well in this perceived future....
@Tooney,
Thanks for sharing David Emerson's speaking notes. I enjoyed reading it and I hope others will find them useful..."think long term"
i doubt if openness will be occurring any time soon, but I believe that it would have a positive impact.