Geosciences

Victor Schmidt • Houston

Marginal fields

Oil fields deplete, but most have significant oil reserves remaining, trapped in the rock pores. The task of extracting the remaining reserves is more of an economic problem than a technical issue. There are many older "depleted" fields that could still add reserves to the world economy if more cost effective thinking were applied.

Recent analyst reports note that many field developments, primarily in the North Sea, have actually destroyed value rather than producing a return for their operators. There are many reasons for this and all are as varied as the fields and operators involved. Perhaps there is another way to approach small- or marginal-field development by considering them as environmental cleanup projects.

Environmental firms and oil companies are on polar sides of many issues. Environmental firms take the high moral ground of cleaning up other's messes and are regulation driven, while oil companies tout competitive market realities and decry the money wasted on unnecessary attention paid to naturally occurring materials.

The truth is that both industries use similar techniques for what are really enhanced recovery projects. Only scale and economics separate the two. Perhaps it is time for operators of marginal oil properties to seek the expertise of environmental firms to help rethink the subsurface and economic realities of extracting residual oil. Certainly geoscientists speak the same language, even if the economics differ.

Superconducting gravity

ARKeX Ltd., a spin-off of Oxford Instruments Plc and ARK Geophysics Ltd., is developing superconducting technology for an airborne gravity instrument, the Exploration Gravity Gradiometer (EGG).

"Airborne gravity gradiometry gives oil and mining companies rapid access to detailed structural information," said Kitty Hall, managing director of ARKeX. EGG will be available in the second half of 2006.

EXPLORATION

Deep GoM study

TGS-Nopec has completed the eastern half of its Gulf of Mexico DeepShelf Interpretation Project. The regional structural interpretation project, completed by Subsurface Consultants, maps horizons ranging from Lower Pliocene to Oligocene across Eugene Island through the Grand Isle OCS regions. The maps are based on sequence boundaries and include interpretations of top/base of salt and faults.

The project combined long offset seismic data from TGSN's Phase 50 seismic grid, along with deep wells and paleontology to create a series of deep, regional structure maps. Isochron maps are being created to locate depocenters and fairways within stratigraphic intervals. The western half of the project should be completed by June.

Geomodeling

Fugro-Jason has released RC&M, software for reservoir characterization and modeling. This technology integrates subsurface data to develop rock property/subsurface information to create a "seismically constrained geological model."

RC&M allows the reservoir team to switch between a geocellular grid and a seismic trace-based grid, and between depth and time in a consistent manner. This enables users to integrate all geomodeling and deliver subsurface information directly as an upscaled, geocellular static model. Geological and geophysical information is delivered to the engineer and production information is provided to the geoscientist for inversion to create an updateable, shared-earth model.

TECHNOLOGY

Spatial exploration

Spotfire Inc. has released DecisionSite MapConnect, which enables users of ESRI ArcMap and Spotfire DecisionSite to conduct exploratory analysis of spatial data together with other attribute information. Supporting data may be scattered among proprietary and public databases, spreadsheets from partners, or file exports from specialist applications such as seismic or well production results. Data quality is easily assessed.

A toolbar button launches the connection and synchronizes spatial information in ArcMap with multi-dimensional data visualizations in any DecisionSite application. Objects of interest selected in either application are visually highlighted in the other. Cross plots (2D and 3D), multi-attribute profile charts, heat maps, auto-summarizing bar, and pie charts are dynamically updated. A one-button snapshot map as a cross plot background allows combined analysis.

Workflows can be captured to speed common operations, and conclusions can be shared via Web interface, or output to presentation media. The software is integrated with statistical packages.

64-bit workstation

IBM has introduced a new computer workstation, the IntelliStation A Pro, developed in collaboration with Landmark Graphics, which offers 64-bit scalability with compatibility for 32-bit applications.

It is designed for increased memory and graphics requirements with a high-speed architecture supporting 8X AGP graphics and PCI-X. The new system offers a transition from 32-bit to 64-bit computing by using a dual-capable AMD Opteron Model 248 (2.2 GHz) processor with PC 3200 memory.