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? 

News of the month

News from the interface between the infinite istropic half-spaces of geoscience and technology. Got tips? 

Matt was at the SEG Annual Meeting in Las Vegas at the beginning of the month. If you didn't make the trip, and even if you did, Don't miss his highlights posts.

Webapp for wells

This is exciting. Subsurfr could be the start of a much-needed and long-overdue wave of rapid web innovation for petrotechnical tools. Much kudos to tiny Wellstorm Development for the bold initiative; it makes you wonder what on earth Halliburton and Schlumberger are up to. Right from your browser, you can fly around the subsurface of North Dakota, see logs, add picks, build surface segments, and provide the creators with feedback. Try it out!

OpendTect gets even awesomer 

OpendTect goes from strength to strength, having passed 100 000 downloads on about 11 November. If you haven't tried it yet, you really should. It's like all those other integrated volume interpretation tools, with the small difference that it's open source-you can read the code. Oh, and it's free. There is that.

Paul de Groot, one of the founders of dGB, told me at SEG that he's been tinkering with code again. He's implemented GLCM-based texture attributes, and it will be in the open source base package soon. Nice.

The next big thing

Landmark's PowerCalculator was good. Geocraft was awesome. Now there's Canopy - Enthought's attempt to bring Python coding to the rest of us. The idea is to provide a MATLAB-like environment for the galaxy of mathematical and scientific computing packs for Python (numpy, scipy, matplotlib, to name a few). It's in beta right now — why not ask for an invite? Even more exiciting for geophysicists — Enthought is developing a set of geoscience plugins, allowing you to load SEGY data, display seismic, and perform other nifty tricks. Can't wait.

More Nova Scotia exploration

BP won licenses in the latest offshore exploration round (NS12–1), in exchange for a $1.05 billion work bid on 4 deep water parcels. This is in line with Shell's winning bid last January of $970 million, and they also added to their acreage — it seems there's an exploration renaissance happening in Nova Scotia. After the award, there were lots of questions about BP's safety record, but the licensing rules only allow for the highest bidder to win — there's no scrutiny of suitability at this stage. Awarding the license and later denying the right to drill seems a bit disingenuous, however. Water depth: up to about 3500 m!

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Except OpendTect and Canopy, because they are awesome and we use them almost every day.

Update on Thursday, November 29, 2012 at 9:58 AM by Matt Hall

Students... take the FIELD challenge!

This news just in (thanks Jesper!) — I knew all about the AAPG Imperial Barrel Award, but hadn't heard of EAGE's equivalent before — the FIELD Challenge. Applications must be in by 15 December. 

Touring vs tunnel vision

My experience with software started, and still largely sits, at the user end. More often than not, interacting with another's design. One thing I have learned from the user experience is that truly great interfaces are engineered to stay out of the way. The interface is only a skin atop the real work that software does underneath — taking inputs, applying operations, producing outputs. I'd say most users of computers don't know how to compute without an interface. I'm trying to break free from that camp. 

In The dangers of default disdain, I wrote about the power and control that the technology designer has over his users. A kind of tunnel is imposed that restricts the choices for interacting with data. And for me, maybe for you as well, the tunnel has been a welcome structure, directing my focus towards that distant point; the narrow aperture invokes at least some forward motion. I've unknowingly embraced the tunnel vision as a means of interacting without substantial choices, without risk, without wavering digressions. I think it's fair to say that without this tunnel, most travellers would find themselves stuck, incapacitated by the hard graft of touring over or around the mountain.

Tour guides instead of tunnels

But there is nothing to do inside the tunnel, no scenery to observe, just a black void between input and output. For some tasks, taking the tunnel is the only obvious and economic choice — all you want is to get stuff done. But choosing the tunnel means you will be missing things along the way. It's a trade off.

For getting from A to B, there are engineers to build tunnels, there are travellers to travel the tunnels, and there is a third kind of person altogether: tour guides take the scenic route. Building your own tunnel is a grand task, only worthwhile if you can find enough passengers to use it. The scenic route isn't just a casual lackadaisical approach. It's necessary for understanding the landscape; by taking it the traveler becomes connected with the territory. The challenge for software and technology companies is to expose people to the richness of their environment while moving them through at an acceptable pace. Is it possible to have a tunnel with windows?

Oil and gas operating companies are good at purchasing the tunnel access pass, but are not very good at building a robust set of tools to navigate the landscape of their data environment. After all, that is the thing that we travellers need to be in constant contact with. Touring or tunneling? The two approaches may or may not arrive at the same destination and they have different costs along the way, making it different business.

News of the month

Like the full moon, our semi-regular news round-up has its second outing this month. News tips?

New software releases

QGIS, our favourite open source desktop GIS too, moves to v1.8 Lisboa. It gains pattern fills, terrain analysis, layer grouping, and lots of other things.

Midland Valley, according to their June newsletter, will put Move 2013 on the Mac, and they're working on iOS and Android versions too. Multi-platform keeps you agile. 

New online tools

The British Geological Survey launched their new borehole viewer for accessing data from the UK's hundreds of shallow holes. Available on mobile platforms too, this is how you do open data, staying relevant and useful to people.

Joanneum Research, whose talk at EAGE I mentioned, is launching their seismic attributes database seismic-attribute.info as a €6000/year consortium, according to an email we got this morning. Agile* won't be joining, we're too in love with Mendeley's platform, but maybe you'd like to — enquire by email.

Moar geoscience jobs

Neftex, a big geoscience consulting and research shop based in Oxford, UK, is growing. Already with over 80 people, they expect to hire another 50 or so. That's a lot of geologists and geophysicists! And Oxford is a lovely part of the world.

Ikon is opening a Canada office in Calgary. Ikon Science Canada Ltd is born! Contact Rob Dudley on rdudley@ikonscience.com for more info.

— Ikon Science America (@IkonAmericas) August 24, 2012

Ikon Science, another UK subsurface consulting and research firm, is opening a Calgary office. We're encouraged to see that they chose to announce this news on Twitter — progressive!

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services. Except QGIS, which we definitely do endorse, cuz it's awesome. 

News of the month

Welcome to our more-or-less regular new post. Seen something awesome? Get in touch!

Convention time!

Next week is Canada's annual petroleum geoscience party, the CSPG–CSEG–CWLS GeoConvention. Thousands of applied geoscientists will descend on Calgary's downtown Telus Convention Centre to hear about the latest science and technology in the oilfield, and catch up with old friends. We're sad to be missing out this year — we hope someone out there will be blogging!

GeoConvention highlights

There are more than fifty technical sessions at the conference this year. For what it's worth, these are the presentations we'd be sitting in the front row for if we were going:

• Dragana Todorovic-Marinic et al., Shedding more light on an oil sand reservoir by applying integrated spectral method analysis, Monday 1540, Macleod B
• Herrera and van der Baan, Automated seismic-to-well ties using dynamic time warping, Tuesday 1540, Glen 203
• Marco Perez et al., Rock physics and depositional trends, Wednesday 0840, Telus 104
• Steve Lynch, Oops: an introduction to seismic wavefield visualization, Wednesday 1340, Glen 203, followed by...
• Matteo Niccoli & Steve Lynch, A more perceptual colour palette for structure maps, Wednesday 1405, Glen 203
• Patrick Connolly, Inversion & integration — in a geological framework, Thursday 1040, Macleod A

Now run to the train and get to the ERCB Core Research Centre for...

• Randolf Koffman et al., A portable core image scanner, Thursday 1130

Guided fault interpretation

We've seen automated fault interpretation before, and now Transform have an offering too. A strongly tech-focused company, they have a decent shot at making it work in ordinary seismic data — the demo shows a textbook example:

GPU processing on the desktop

On Monday Paradigm announced their adoption of NVIDIA's Maximus technology into their desktop applications. Getting all gooey over graphics cards seems very 2002, but this time it's not about graphics — it's about speed. Reserving a Quadro processor for graphics, Paradigm is computing seismic attributes on a dedicated Tesla graphics processing unit, or GPU, rather than on the central processing unit (CPU). This is cool because GPUs are massively parallel and are much, much faster at certain kinds of computation because they don't have the process management, I/O, and other overheads that CPUs have. This is why seismic processing companies like CGGVeritas are adopting them for imaging. Cutting edge stuff!

In other news...

• The seismic processing landscape continues to shift as Schlumberger bought GEDCO last week. 
• TerraSpark's Insight Earth 1.7 will contain shale play tools, for fracture and permeability estimation for example.
• Geosoft have a new 'software service' product in their Montaj suite called VOXI.
• There was a nice story on the Scientific American blog recently about LWD from D/V Chikyu in the Pacific Ocean.
• BP have released an amazing-sounding 300GB deepwater Gulf of Mexico seismic dataset to academia, according to their in-house magazine (via OilIT). 

This regular news feature is for information only. We aren't connected with any of these organizations, and don't necessarily endorse their products or services.