Here comes GeoConvention 2013

Next week Matt and I are heading to the petroleum capital of Canada for the 2013 GeoConvention. There will be 308 talks, 125 posters, over 4000 attendees, 100 exhibiting companies, and at least 2 guys blogging their highlights off.

My picks for Monday

Studying the technical abstracts ahead of time is the only way to make the most of your schedule. There are 9 sessions going on at any given time, a deep sense of FOMO has already set in. These are the talks I have decided on for Monday: 

Seismics for unconventionals

I watched Carl Reine from Nexen give a talk two years ago where he deduced a power-law relationship characterizing natural fracture networks in the Horn River shale. He will show how integrating such fracture intensity patterns with inversion models yields a powerful predictor of frackability, and uses microseismic to confirm it.

On a related note, and also from the Horn River Basin, Andreas Wuestefeld will show how microseismic can be used to identify fluid drainage patterns from microseismic data. Production simulation from an actual microseismic experiment. Numerical modeling, and physical experiment inextricably linked. I already love it.

Forward models and experimental tests

One is a design case study for optimizing interpolation, the other is a 3D seismic geometry experiment, the third is a benchtop physical fracture model made out of Plexiglass and resin.

Broadband seismic

Gets to the point of what hinders seismic resolution, and it does something about it through thoughtful design. This is just really nice looking data, two talks, same author: a step change, and impact of broadband. 

Best title award 

Goes to Forensic chemostratigraphy. Gimmicky name or revolutionary concept? You can't always judge a talk by the title, or the quality of the abstract. But it's hard not to. What talks are on your must-see list this year?

A really good conversation

Matt and I are hosting an unsession on the morning of Tuesday 7 May. It will be structured, interactive, and personal. The result: a ranked list of the most pressing problems facing the upstream geoscientists, especially in those hard to reach places between the disciplines. This is not a session where you sit and listen. Everyone will participate. We will explore questions that matter, connect diverse perspectives, and, above all, capture our collective knowledge. It might be scary, it might be uncomfortable, it might not be for you. But if you think it is, bring your experience and individuality, and we will do that thing called integration. We can only host 60 people, so if you don't want to be turned away, arrive early to claim a spot. We start at 8 a.m. in Telus 101/102 on the main floor of the north building.

What is an unsession?

Yesterday I invited you (yes, you) to our Unsolved Problems Unsession on 7 May in Calgary. What exactly will be involved? We think we can accomplish two things:

1. Brainstorm the top 10, or 20, or 50 most pressing problems in exploration geoscience today. Not limited to but focusing on those problems that affect how well we interface — with each other, with engineers, with financial people, with the public even. Integration problems.
2. Select one or two of those problems and solve them! Well, not solve them, but explore ways to approach solving them. What might a solution be worth? How many disciplines does it touch? How long might it take? Where could we start? Who can help?

There are bright, energetic young people out there looking for relevant problems to work on towards a Master's or PhD. There are entrepreneurs looking for high-value problems to create a new business from. And software companies looking for ways to be more useful and relevant to their users. And there is more than one interpreter wishing that innovation would speed up a bit in our industry and make their work a little — or a lot — easier. 

We don't know where it will lead, but we think this unsession is one way to get some conversations going. This is not a session to dip in and out of — we need 4 hours of your time. Bring your experience, your uniqueness, and your curiosity.

Let's reboot our imaginations about what we can do in our science.

An invitation to a brainstorm

Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden; to cast a glance at the next advances of our science and at the secrets of its development during future centuries? What particular goals will there be toward which the leading [geoscientific] spirits of coming generations will strive? What new methods and new facts in the wide and rich field of [geoscientific] thought will the new centuries disclose?

— Adapted from David Hilbert (1902). Mathematical Problems, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 8 (10), p 437–479. Originally appeared in in Göttinger Nachrichten, 1900, pp. 253–297.

Back at the end of October, just before the SEG Annual Meeting, I did some whining about conferences: so many amazing, creative, energetic geoscientists, doing too much listening and not enough doing. The next day, I proposed some ways to make conferences for productive — for us as scientists, and for our science itself. 

Evan and I are chairing a new kind of session at the Calgary GeoConvention this year. What does ‘new kind of session’ mean? Here’s the lowdown:

The Unsolved Problems Unsession at the 2013 GeoConvention will transform conference attendees, normally little more than spectators, into active participants and collaborators. We are gathering 60 of the brightest, sparkiest minds in exploration geoscience to debate the open questions in our field, and create new approaches to solving them. The nearly 4-hour session will look, feel, and function unlike any other session at the conference. The outcome will be a list of real problems that affect our daily work as subsurface professionals — especially those in the hard-to-reach spots between our disciplines. Come and help shed some light, room 101, Tuesday 7 May, 8:00 till 11:45.

What you can do

• Where does your workflow stumble? Think up the most pressing unsolved problems in your workflows — especially ones that slow down collaboration between the disciplines. They might be organizational, they might be technological, they might be scientific.
• Put 7 May in your calendar and come to our session! Better yet, bring a friend. We can accommodate about 60 people. Be one of the first to experience a new kind of session!
• If you would like to help host the event, we're looking for 5 enthusiastic volunteers to play a slightly enlarged role, helping guide the brainstorming and capture the goodness. You know who you are. Email hello@agilegeoscience.com. 

5 ways to kickstart an interpretation project

Last Friday, teams around the world started receiving external hard drives containing this year's datasets for the AAPG's Imperial Barrel Award (IBA for short). I competed in the IBA in 2008 when I was a graduate student at the University of Alberta. We were coached by the awesome Dr Murray Gingras (@MurrayGingras), we won the Canadian division, and we placed 4th in the global finals. I was the only geophysical specialist on the team alongside four geology graduate students.

Five things to do

Whether you are a staff geoscientist, a contractor, or competitor, it can help to do these things first:

1. Make a data availability map (preferably in QGIS or ArcGIS). A graphic and geospatial representation of what you have been given.
2. Make well scorecards: as a means to demonstrate not only that you have wells, but what information you have within the wells.
3. Make tables, diagrams, maps of data quality and confidence. Indicate if you have doubts about data origins, data quality, interpretability, etc.
4. Background search: The key word is search, not research. Use Mendeley to organize, tag, and search through the array of literature
5. Use Time-Scale Creator to make your own stratigraphic column. You can manipulate the vector graphic, and make it your own. Much better than copying an old published figure. But use it for reference.

All of these things can be done before assigning roles, before saying who needs to do what. All of this needs to be done before the geoscience and the prospecting can happen. To skirt around it is missing the real work, and being complacent. Instead of being a hammer looking for a nail, lay out your materials, get a sense of what you can build. This will enable educated conversations about how you can spend your geoscientific manpower, division of labour, resources, time, etc.

Read more, then go apply it 

In addition to these tips for launching out of the blocks, I have also selected and categorized blog posts that I think might be most relevant and useful. We hope they are helpful to all geoscientists, but especially for students. Visit the Agile blog highlights list on SubSurfWiki.

I wish a happy and exciting IBA competition to all participants, and their supporting university departments. If you are competing, say hi in the comments and tell us where you hail from. 

The digital well scorecard

In my last post, I ranted about the soup of acronyms that refer to well log curves; a too-frequent book-keeping debacle. This pain, along with others before it, has motivated me to design a solution. At this point all I have is this sketch, a wireframe of should-be software that allows you visualize every bit of borehole data you can think of:

The goal is, show me where the data is in the domain of the wellbore. I don't want to see the data explicitly (yet), just its whereabouts in relation to all other data. Data from many disaggregated files, reports, and so on. It is part inventory, part book-keeping, part content management system. Clear the fog before the real work can begin. Because not even experienced folks can see clearly in a fog.

The scorecard doesn't yield a number or a grade point like a multiple choice test. Instead, you build up a quantitative display of your data extents. With the example shown above, I don't even have to look at the well log to tell you that you are in for a challenging well tie, with the absence of sonic measurements in the top half of the well. 

The people that I showed this to immediately undestood what was being expressed. They got it right away, so that bodes well for my preliminary sketch. Can you imagine using a tool like this, and if so, what features would you need?