Amazing changes in exploration technology are likely as the industry cruises into 2000.

As of press time we're still in the old millennium. So we're not sure if anyone's computers crashed on January 1.
But Y2K concerns are just the tip of the iceberg for the new millennium when it comes to discussing exploration. In 20 years this facet of the business may bear little resemblance to what we're used to now.
Seismic technology
It's impossible to discuss exploration technology without discussing seismic. Everyone knows 3D seismic has been the single most important factor in improving success rates and lowering risk. So what changes will the next century bring?
For one thing, seismic is becoming a cradle-to-grave tool, not just an explorationist's tool. In a sense, it's come full-circle - when 3D first came on the market it was mostly used as a development tool to fine-tune larger 2D basin exploration. The reason was cost. But the past decade has seen such huge strides in 3D technology that it now can be used in basin exploration the way 2D, and before that gravity and magnetics, were used.
Said Roger Anderson of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, "Everywhere there's an oilfield, there will be seismic." But the technological improvements to seismic are somewhat limited, he said, because "the earth is a very strong low-pass filter, so there's not much more we can do that we're not doing now." This is not to say all seismic advances have been made and there are no more to follow. Such applications as multicomponent seismic, which takes into consideration shear waves as well as compressional waves, and time-lapse seismic, which uses seismic to track fluid movement through the life of a field, are on the threshold of greater industry acceptance. But experts differ as to the ultimate use of these technologies.
Steve Roche, an area geophysicist for Output Exploration and a vice president of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, has devoted much of his career to the examination of multicomponent applications. "Not only do you have two different measurements for the same rock type to get additional information," Roche said. "Shear waves also have an additional property - they can be polarized, and one exciting frontier being explored right now is whether or not the shear waves can be related to the pore structure and fractures, which are directly related to how the fluids move. That's always been missing.
"Geophysicists can give the reservoir engineers a pretty good picture of the geometric shape of the reservoir, but with shear waves and polarization we can start giving them a new parameter - the exact movement of the fluids. That would be a whole step-function forward in how the two disciplines could work together."
Roche added advanced migration techniques could take multicomponent interpretation to the realm of full-vector wavefield imaging, which would enable geoscientists to fine-tune the resolution of a reservoir from its current limits - a cube of about 30m on a side - to a much finer resolution. "The information that the reservoir engineers need is about 5m or less per side, and we've got a long way to go to do that," he said. "Vector wavefield imaging will increase the reservoir resolution so that we can see smaller and smaller volumes in the rock."
Time-lapse or 4D seismic also is a growing market, but experts debate the extent to which it will be used. Roice Nelson, chief visualization officer at Continuum Resources, expects at least the large oilfields to have permanently installed instrumentation at the surface and within the reservoir to take measurements, including seismic, periodically for monitoring purposes. "People are going to start listening to the geology and fluid production, and they're going to start shooting multiple surveys on a regular basis across those fields that are instrumented," Nelson said.
But questions will remain unless the technology drops in price. The very concept of time-lapse means results aren't available immediately, something oil companies may have trouble justifying in a business model that elevates net present value above all. Burying millions of dollars in high-tech listening devices might make them skittish as well, leading one oil company leader to suggest the concept of biodegradable sensors, much to the amusement of several seismic contractors. And perhaps one of the things that's hurt time-lapse most of all is the timing of its introduction - companies were beginning to be truly bullish on its prospects on the eve of the cataclysmic price failure of 1998.
Still, time-lapse seismic is considered a viable, if small, part of the seismic market. "It was a market that wasn't available 5 to 10 years ago," said William Schneider, chairman of Fairfield Industries. "It's not a huge market in the overall scheme of things, but it's one that's growing and I think will continue to grow."
So while seismic is moved down the value stream from exploration to production, other exploration tools move in to take up some of the slack. Gravity and magnetics, which used to be the sole tools of exploration, are again coming into their own as adjuncts that provide additional information. Satellite data, geochemistry, crosswell seismic techniques and even electromagnetic data may all someday be part of the explorationist's toolkit; already, Nelson said, new-generation satellite images offer resolution to 1m, enabling geoscientists to identify rust patterns in vegetation that might be due to oxidation from hydrocarbon seeps.
But seismic will continue to prevail. "For future trends in exploration, you look at the Navy and view what they're using as a 10-year advancement over where we are now," Anderson said. "Using acoustics is dangerous, so they don't use it as much as they used to, but in order to close in on the kill, they use it. There's no other bandwidth out there that I can see - I think seismic is there for good."
Computer power
It's widely agreed the seismic industry was one of the first to enter the digital revolution. And it's still setting the standard for computing demands. "Processing is really driven by computer price performance, and we see today very effective workstations in our business," said Stephen Ludlow, vice chairman of Veritas DGC. "But from our vendors we're expecting some pretty major leaps in price performance over the next 2 to 4 years, which I think means we'll be doing more to the data. That will in turn require more reprocessing."
Ludlow added that despite all of the advances in computer power in recent years, the industry still is forced to make trade-offs due to economics. "We all say we can do depth migration, for instance, very well, but the bottom line is that everybody's got a compromise somewhere in their algorithm. The only purists out there are probably Shell and Exxon, and even they realize that the extra 2% they get isn't worth the extra 200% in cost."
One measure being tried by Fairfield and others is the use of workstation clusters rather than supercomputers. The company uses a cluster of 500 workstations for its processing, which gives it the processing capability of a Cray or large supercomputer for a fraction of the cost. "I think within 1 to 3 years we'll find that crunch power is no longer a problem, either economically or getting enough to do the more sophisticated algorithms," Schneider said. "This will give us better information and better images of what's out there, and that will stimulate reshooting of areas or reprocessing of areas which heretofore didn't yield much."
Visualization
In contrast to the idea of finding newer, faster ways to process the burgeoning amounts of data is the idea of visualization, which presents data to viewers in a way that maximizes their natural instincts for assimilating information.
"There is so much data that interpreting that data in traditional ways is not really possible," Nelson said. "If we look or listen to that data in new ways, what happens is that there are patterns that emerge. We can use our geological training to understand those patterns immediately without interpretation.
"To paraphrase Wallace Pratt, oil is found first in the mind, and if we can extend our minds, we ought to be able to find more oil."
Continuum's vision is to enable the viewers of the data to interact with it in the same way they would interact with the three-dimensional world, not with a mouse on a flat computer screen. Said chief operating officer Dave Ridyard, the industry's approach to finding the data to make decisions is akin to looking for an orange in the refrigerator by examining past grocery store receipts and keeping a checklist of who's eaten what. It's much easier simply to open the crisper and look for the orange.
"You start the whole adventure every time you try to find something," Ridyard said. "It's not just the seismic data and wells; it's permit data, environmental impact assessments, production histories and so on. I think what will happen is that we will be building models of reservoirs, and the models will have built into them the intelligence to go and do the data mining for you. You'll be able to turn your office into a model [of your reservoir], and you'll be able to walk in and root around until you find some oil.
"That's when all this data becomes useful. It's not useful if it's cluttering up your tape drives and your hard drives. It's only useful if the person managing the asset can look at it."
The great beyond
Anderson envisions a future for exploration in which the business of finding oil and gas will bear little resemblance to today's configuration. He foresees a virtual world of oil and gas facilities without a central office "because we're finally going to have the tools to do it."
He envisions live TV coverage of the drillbit penetrating the formation or the fluids flowing up the wellbore, a more easily observable business that can be monitored, and therefore managed, much more efficiently.
Much of the improvement Anderson sees will be borrowed from industries other than oil and gas. Given the state of research and development (R&D) in this industry, this help from other segments probably will be necessary. The majors have divested much of their R&D efforts over the past few years, and while the service companies have picked up much of that slack, funding in general on R&D has dropped. This is a cause of concern to some.
"The service companies will fall short for two reasons," said Ken Larner, a professor in the department of geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines. "One is that they're really strapped to be able to provide the funds for the level of research that was done by the oil companies in the past. Secondly, I just don't think they have the breadth and scope of outlook that has existed within oil companies' research groups, from which really important breakthroughs have come. There have been great breakthroughs from service companies and universities, but I've always felt that the driving force has been the solid base from within the oil companies."
Not surprisingly, service companies disagree. "I think the R&D outsourcing by the oil companies is a good thing," Ludlow said. "All of the R&D that's been done by them in the past has been very expensive to implement. By us being at the front end, it gives the industry a better chance to commercialize these things once they come along. It may not be as creative - I think you'll see a more commercial edge to R&D. A lot of R&D is trying to do things quicker, better and cheaper. And there's a lot to be said for that."
Added Mario Ruscev, president of Reservoir Evaluation Seismic for Geco-Prakla, "Historically, the seismic industry has been very efficient on spreading innovation very fast, making new advances a commodity within years. As the oil companies were the main driver for innovation, they also got these benefits from their operations, so it did not matter so much. Now that more is subcontracted, the forced spread of new technology might not allow the service company to get its investment back and might therefore kill the innovation.
"I still believe that if we bring differentiated value to the oil companies, both we and they will see benefits. But it will be a change in the way innovation is seen in the seismic industry, and it will bring an evolution in the relations between the oil companies and the contractors."
The best possible future for exploration, of course, would be the extension of those wildcat success rates, which already have improved dramatically due to 3D seismic, up to the 100% mark. Given the incremental nature of anticipated seismic improvements, oil companies probably will never reach the point where they can drill with the utmost certainty of finding oil and gas.
But the new developments that will become commercially viable within the next few years will certainly aid the industry in its quest to unlock the mysteries of the subsurface.