- 5 August 2024
- Posted by: David Bamford
- Category: Energy innovations
This is a message that relies quite a bit on my personal experiences, I apologise for that!
My argument is that we have arrived at a somewhat ‘settled science’ for subsurface technology, in particular for Exploration, and that we should be looking around to see if we can spot or anticipate the next ‘disruption’.
Some personal stories
Back in the late 1980s I was fortunate to meet Sidney Kaufman who at the time was executive director of COCORP but, more importantly for my story, had in the late 1930s headed up for Shell Oil the first offshore seismic crews in the shallowest waters of the Gulf of Mexico – their first attempts mimicked what they knew from land seismic and so deployed two (shrimp) boats. He had two nice tales to tell – firstly, that Shell Oil executives thought there was no future in what he was doing as nobody explored offshore and, secondly, when their accountant saw his expense claim he said “next time use one boat!” – possibly therefore being the parent of modern towed streamer seismic…..
Let’s roll forward to talk about 3D seismic; as I understand it, the first 3D was shot by Exxon in ~1965, onshore in the USA. By the time I arrived at BP Aberdeen in 1986, Shell had shot some 3Ds in the North Sea but BP regarded it as ‘newfangled’, probably unnecessary and expensive. Nonetheless we gradually got some under our belt, I think Magnus was our first one.
By the early 1990s, it was clear that 3Ds had a ‘cycle time’ problem – they could take 2 to 3 years from the planning stage to a completed interpretation. Fortunately two ‘IT’ developments took hold – rapid interpretation workstations began to appear in the market place (courtesy of Geoquest, Landmark) and new computing power made onboard, rapid turnaround, processing possible (courtesy of Geco, Western). Soon this enabled….
Exploration 3Ds – several thousand sq kms of good quality regional 3D, impacting prospect delineation and selection of drilling locations, coupled with one more thing.
Attributes/AVO – again I’d started to hear about this in the mid 1980s and it really took off in BP in the Gulf of Mexico in the late 1980s and in the UKCS in the early 1990s, especially West of the Shetlands (Foinaven, Schiehallion – tho’ I do remember one of the senior executives in the BP Glasgow office telling me “we’ll never drill on that!”).
These two things – Exploration 3D and Attributes/AVO – helped the partners working deep water Angola in the second half of the 1990s deliver a ‘disruptive’ >90% exploration success rate.
Better examples than mine?
4D or ‘time lapse’ seismic: enabling reservoir and petroleum engineers to ‘see’ the movement of oil, gas or water in their reservoirs.
IOR and EOR: transforming the customary ‘30% recovery factor’ of the early 1980s to the ‘>70%’ of today – lots of examples but the Forties Field is a notable one.
Horizontal drilling: manifestly the unconventional shale oil/gas revolution onshore in the USA would not have happened without this technology (and its compadre, fracking); one of the more remarkable facts is that the first horizontal well was drilled in California in 1947! Eventually George Mitchell spotted its potential……..
And many more!
Exploration Technology today:
Over several years, Finding Petroleum has devoted both face-to-face meetings and, increasingly, webinars to developments in subsurface technology; I confess that it’s my history and prejudices that have resulted in exploration topics being rather dominant!
But I think we can say that:
Exploration thinking begins with deep geoscience understanding, perhaps commencing with a chrono-stratigraphic chart…..
Petroleum Systems and geologically informed insights are then the starting point. My impression is that the reliance on geochemistry + ‘stretching’ models to postulate heat flow + empirical rules for migration efficiency is now outmoded and indeed led us into several dead ends. Dig out any of Andy Pepper’s presentations within the link above and you’ll see what I mean.
Exploration 3D is now the offshore norm – the sine qua non for seismic stratigraphy and structural analysis – and I would question the sanity of anybody who considers drilling a multi-millions $ well without it!
The use of Attributes/AVO has moved on immensely and I would strongly recommend Pat Connolly’s presentation as the ‘way to do it’ best-in-class benchmark.
What of EMGS? For a long time I thought its contribution was debatable, certainly overhyped, but Daniel Baltar’s presentation Super basin 16 EM technology showed very well, and convincingly, how the technology had a good part to play.
To use a much abused term, we could refer to this short list as ‘settled science’.
Mindful of some of our scientific forefathers who used a term like this in the 19th and 20th Centuries, to be proven dramatically wrong on all sorts of topics, I’d like to open a discussion on where we might see future ‘disruption’.
Future ‘Disruptive ‘ Subsurface Technologies?
It may have dawned on you as you read the above than none of the ‘disruptions’ I’ve described were completely predictable nor were they complete ‘black swans’ but someone, somewhere was working on them and the key was the transfer of the technology from A to B, for example from the USA to the U.K.
So what can we learn from this? To look around carefully perhaps!
Currently, I’ve seen some folk arguing that the application of AI to subsurface data will be ‘disruptive’. Perhaps so. Though none of the examples I have seen so far lead me to believe that the role of the skilled, knowledgeable, interpretative, geoscientist will be replaced.
And very specifically, I’m unconvinced by the enthusiasm for the application of AI to seismic processing other than to transform the speed of the undertaking; the output is still not fact but another model which has to tested with the drill bit, more than once*.
Changing tack slightly, can technology ‘disrupt’ the paradigm that the recovery factor for unconventional shale oil/gas will (always) be <<10%? Maybe this is being worked on in a laboratory somewhere, in a startup…
Subsurface technology will need to be innovative to help with Carbon Capture & Storage. We will need to be assured that a suitable reservoir rock sits in a trapping configuration so that injected CO2 stays stored – relatively easy to promise when the storage is in a depleted field that had trapped oil and gas for millions of years, not so credible if it’s just water-bearing rock?
Finally, Mark Shann’s very recent webinar is a highly instructive analysis finding ‘lessons to be learnt’ from discoveries that were themselves ‘disruptive’.
Ideas on a postcard, please!
*once bitten, twice shy……..early in 1988 I was left in charge of BP Aberdeen’s exploration department whilst the Exploration Director was away working on BP’s acquisition of Britoil. We were drilling 23/26a-10 looking for a sub-salt trap; I had been convinced by the latest in-house 2D processing algorithm’s output that we’d encounter no more than a few hundred meters of salt and then pass through the base of the salt into oil pay – after several thousand feet of salt I was finally persuaded/ordered to stop! When I left Aberdeen a little while later, I was presented with the core in this image – it’s served as a permanent reminder that you learn most from your mistakes (thanks, Mike Bowman!)!
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References: https://www.findingpetroleum.com/home/pastEvents.aspx
https://www.findingpetroleum.com/event/Super-Basins-14-Adroit-use-of-AttributesAVO-from-Exploration-3D/c8ce5.aspx
https://www.findingpetroleum.com/event/Super-Basin-16-EM-technology/3be71.aspx
https://www.findingpetroleum.com/event/Lessons-from-past-disruptive-discoveries/ee1b6.aspx