NEW ORLEANS—The big buzz at the Society of Exploration Geophysicist (SEG) annual meeting on Oct. 20 was the joint announcement between Landmark, a Halliburton company, and CGG that shared customers will be able to access interpretation and reservoir characterization technologies and geoscience data from both companies, using the industry’s first E&P enterprise class platform, Landmark’s DecisionSpace.

A series of workflows enabled by the platform will be delivered through the connectivity of geoscience applications and data.

In a presentation at Halliburton’s booth, Camilo Rodriguez, chief consulting advisor for Landmark, and Rob Mayer, senior vice president of business development for CGG, gave a brief presentation of the capabilities enabled by the collaboration. As a proof of concept, the first two challenges to be tackled will be unconventional reservoir characterization and time-lapse interpretation. Both are complex workflows.

The unconventional workflow has become more complicated because the length of the wells and the number of completions stages has doubled in just the past five years. And even though operators have managed to reduce their costs, it’s obvious that these reservoirs are still not well understood since 75% of the oil comes from only 25% of the perforations.

In an example from the Haynesville Shale, the idea was to simulate hydraulic fracturing to determine how and where to drill and how and where to frack. The demo showed how to build a framework starting with the well, determining seismic rock properties, petrophysics, rock physics, mineralogy and the rock fabric; then moving on to surface seismic; quantitative interpretation; and ultimately microseismic.

Starting with the well logs, the workflow looks for the best seismic attributes to predict certain properties such as total porosity and total organic carbon. This is done by determining a correlation between these attributes and production from other wells in the area. A full 3-D volume of production is uploaded into an earth model. Then a fracture model is built using well data as well as anisotropy data from the seismic. This helps define the areas with the most natural fractures and model their geometry.

According to a press release, Landmark and CGG will engage with customers to develop a new class of E&P workflows to meet industry challenges. “These next-generation software suites will support improved prospect generation, well location and path definition, completion design, development planning, and reservoir management,” the release stated.

Nagaraj Srinivasan, vice president of Landmark, added, “Landmark has been working with both customers and partners to drive the pace of innovation with our goal of helping customers maximize recovery rates in less time. We believe that the deep insights CGG brings on the future vision of seismic data, combined with our modern and scalable platform and application suite, will enable our customers to achieve a much richer understanding of reservoir performance to help drive higher oil recovery and cash flows.”

Sophie Zurquiyah, COO of CGG, said: “CGG has a long history of advancing the E&P industry’s understanding of the subsurface and through this technology collaboration can bring a new depth of understanding and increased efficiency to our clients.”

Contact the author, Rhonda Duey, at rduey@hartenergy.com.