The pace of change within the computer technology industry will enable software vendors to provide better geoscience knowledge solutions to their clients.

Bring costs down and push productivity up. Of late, this has become the new mantra of the oil and gas industry. And, like other industries, oil and gas companies are looking to computer-aided technologies to contribute to their bottom line. The question is, what can and should software vendors offer the oil and gas industry for them to achieve this goal?
In order to answer this, let us look at the enablers of change that we, today's geoscience software vendors, can exploit to meet these challenges, as well as at the future role of software vendors.
The era of computer-aided exploration tools has somewhat changed. The oil and gas industry's concerns for cost-effectiveness demand a more holistic approach - geoscience software and services that optimize the reservoir's full life cycle. Recent advances in computing technologies and geoscience justify the oil and gas industry's expectations that software vendors deliver next-generation reservoir management solutions.
Enablers of change
Advances in computing power have significantly reduced processing time, and cost of computing power has dramatically dropped. Thus, time and cost no longer pose a serious constraint to the reservoir characterization and management process.
Developments in mathematics and computer science enable computers to manipulate and analyze ever larger volumes of complex data sets while maintaining data integrity. Advances in data-compression technology allow us analyze compressed data sets with significant savings in processing time. This also permits effective transmission of large data and graphic sets across communication links. Thus, these advances are critical enablers for the handling of large seismic data sets and graphics-intensive images of the prospects.
Computing languages and architecture have evolved so that the market can expect a number of advances in the structure and functionality of next-generation applications. Applications can now be platform-independent, in other words, scalable from laptops to supercomputers.
We also can expect applications to seamlessly coexist between Unix, Windows NT and Linux operating systems and to integrate with Web-based applications. Advances in applications architecture now permit the development of a modular common infrastructure - a critical enabler for the integration of diverse applications.
We can expect continuing advances in visualization technology. This is a critical enabler for the imaging of multiattribute geoscience data sets. In particular, this will advance the imaging of high-resolution and complex prospect modeling.
Thus, a whole new way of engineering software is available to the applications vendors - we now have the tools to build integrated graphics-intensive multiapplication solutions that operate in all computing environments without diminishing functionality.
And just around the corner is the Web revolution. Rapidly developing Web technology is creating a paradigm shift in how we can provide IT-based services. The Web removes location and access barriers as well as IT systems management barriers.
IT resource-intensive geoscience applications will be deliverable over the Web, reducing or even removing the burden of database management, applications and IT systems maintenance from the oil and gas industry. Web-enabled geoscience applications will become easily accessible globally - a critical efficiency factor for the oil and gas industry's worldwide operations.
Redefining the role of software vendors
The global oil and gas industry is experiencing attrition. Industrywide downsizing and changing education and career trends have left fewer geoscience professionals doing more work.
According to an article by John Pohlman, president of Pohlman International, which specializes in computer technology for the oil and gas industry, "The average age of an employee in the oil industry is now over 46, and for geoscience professionals it is a bit older."
The knowledge drain is expected to become a more serious management issue for many oil and gas companies. Leading geoscience software vendors are becoming not only the logical repository for geoscience knowledge, but also the research and development expertise base for further geoscience advances. Obviously this is a different role from the traditional software development house.
We can expect oil and gas companies and large integrated oilfield service providers to welcome these changes because they are already realizing the inherent difficulties in retaining and advancing geoscience knowledge.
Software vendors will assume more responsibility for building the geoscience solutions to replace the expertise lost to attrition among scientists. Technology vendors will increasingly take on the tasks of geoscience data storage and analysis, and their relationships with the oil and gas companies will become even deeper and long-lasting.
Software vendors will evolve into geoscience knowledge solutions providers.
The result: continuing delivery of knowledge-based innovations as the cost-cutting driver for the industry.
Next-generation solutions
Enable deployment of new technologies. The next-generation software solutions will provide real-time refinement of the subsurface prospect model, the drilling program and the well-path engineering using drill rig data obtained during drilling, and allow improved high-resolution prospect modeling; and
Maximize geoscientists' and engineers' contributions. The geoscientists and engineers remaining in the oil and gas industry, many of whom are senior-level employees, are handling more work than ever. Optimal use of these scarce human resources requires that they spend their time on interpretation of results and decision-making rather than management of data and its analysis.
This leads naturally to the expectation that next-generation geoscience knowledge solution providers will:
l embed solutions in mega-applications;
l enable asset teams to work more effectively; and
l deliver more sophisticated decision tools.
Integrate mega-applications supported by a shared earth model. The oil and gas industry is struggling to cope with unconnected geoscience and engineering solutions and too many microapplications that each focus on niche aspects of the workflow. The sheer volume of professional software programs used in the industry has ballooned in response to the demand for highly specialized niche applications. The average geologist is expected to be familiar with as many as 22 applications. Geophysicists and engineers must each deal with more than 40 applications in order to do their jobs. Fifteen years ago, these same, then younger, professionals were working with fewer than 10 applications, Pohlman wrote.
Obviously, this has to change. Oil and gas companies need to work with embedded solutions that feature large application sets (mega-application sets) with scientifically valid links between the various applications, actually sharing the earth model. This reintegration of the disparate geosciences will be accomplished by incorporating the latest advances in the oil- and gas-relevant geosciences (for example, the complete seismic data analysis process). It is the embedding of the geoscience linkages that is the biggest challenge to the industry in meeting its reservoir optimization goal; it can best be accomplished with next-generation geoscience solutions.
Asset teams and new workflows
The oil and gas industry has increasingly adopted the asset team approach. The need to reach decisions that are more accurate and less risky in less time and with fewer resources can be met by ensuring the different geoscience disciplines work well together in the asset teams.
To make these teams more effective in achieving the reservoir life-cycle optimization goal, they need a new set of tools and associated workflows.
Adopting integrated mega-applications has increased the asset teams' effectiveness. Mega-applications, which are supported by the shared earth model, redefine the workflows for the asset team. They enable simultaneous analysis by each of the disciplines of the common data set. There is a significant benefit: each specialist will have real-time information on the results from the rest of the asset team's analyses. An asset team's joint outputs and decisions will be significantly improved, and results will be delivered in a far shorter time.
Decision tools
Oil and gas corporate decisions on reservoir exploitation are today informed by the output from the geoscience applications. These applications do not provide decision analyses but are only geoscience descriptors of the prospect.
Operations and investment decisions require, ideally, a knowledge and analysis of options and a financial evaluation of alternatives. Today these decision valuation tools are not integrated with the geoscience descriptor tools. Neither is the risk evaluation of the prospect.
Next-generation geoscience solutions can be expected to address the decision issues, providing qualitative and quantitative outputs that are fully integrated with risk assessment and benefit-cost valuations of alternative scenarios and solutions.
Innovation
The software vendors that have the courage to innovate and change their roles now will be the geoscience knowledge leaders through this new decade. And at the end of the day, the beneficiaries of all this innovation and change in roles will be the oil and gas companies, who will be able to measure the effects in real improvements to their bottom line.