New exploration technology is poised to help asset teams unlock even more secrets of the deep.

If nobody's exploring, is there any need for exploration technology? Apparently so. While contractors that serve the exploration end of the business wait for oil companies to start looking for oil again, technology research continues apace, and those oil companies that do ramp up their exploration efforts will find, within the next couple of years, an improved and varied array of tools to help them get the job done.
And these tools aren't just coming from the service companies. A surprising piece of good news is that the major oil companies are beginning to spend more of their income on R&D, a neighborhood they'd all but abandoned recently. In talking to exploration technology gurus at several oil companies, I was pleased to learn that while these companies no longer develop technology strictly for their own proprietary use, they've also not completely dumped the onus of R&D spending and risk onto service companies and university consortia.
This is bringing about a serious attitude change among major companies used to an ivory tower approach to R&D. "Everything you need to know about your business is contained within your failures," George King of BP Amoco told attendees of a panel discussion at last year's Society of Petroleum Engineers meeting. "We, as an industry, tend to bury our failures. I don't see SPE papers on failures.
"Necessity may be the mother of invention, but desperation may be her truly innovative child. When a problem threatens to put you out of business, you get creative."
I asked our technology gurus to look into their crystal balls and describe the most exciting exploration technology developments within the next 2 years. Here's what they found.
Remote sensing, potential fields
Still a black-box concept for many, the acceptance of technologies such as satellite imagery and gravity and magnetics tends to ebb and flow in the oil industry. But many major companies believe these techniques provide an important assist to mainstream seismic.
Conoco is actively involved with gravity and magnetics technology and has developed a proprietary software that takes the data and inverts it with control from seismic to image base of salt or volcanics. The company also has partnered with Bell Geospace to explore tensor gradiometry, a technology borrowed from the US Navy that measures a gravity or magnetic field's change in three dimensions as the tool moves across the Earth's surface. "There are two camps on gravity and magnetics," said Alan Huffman, manager of Conoco's Seismic Imaging Technology Center. "There's the group that uses it, and there are some companies that are not using it. My own perception is that it sometimes detects things that the seismic cannot see, and it also provides a totally independent dataset with which to cross-match seismic interpretations."
Satellite imagery is also seen as a technology that will continue to improve. "Satellite imagery has been a huge enabler for the oil industry," said Tim Warren, director of Shell Technology EP. "If you look in the deepwater basins, the ability to see natural oil slicks on the sea surface is a real tell-tale, if you understand the geology underneath, to the occurrence of hydrocarbons."
Warren also mentioned geochemistry as an oft-overlooked but useful tool. "Just look at our ability to fingerprint traces of hydrocarbons and to understand so much more about migration and accumulation models," he said. "I really do see geochemistry as a key underlying enabler to much improved basin modeling and charge modeling."
Seismic data
Obviously it would be difficult to discuss exploration technology without mentioning seismic, and key emerging technologies in all areas of seismic surveying will set the tone of future exploration.
Several people expressed excitement about such new acquisition technology as Schlumberger's Q systems. Mike Bahorich, executive vice president of exploration and production technology for Apache Corp., said this type of acquisition system, which uses either digital geophones or an A-to-D converter for each geophone connected to a cable network, enables far more channels to be recorded than was possible in the past, and at much lower cost. "It enables us to perform seismic processing concepts that we have been unable to do cost-effectively in the past, such as refraction statics applied to each geophone and better coherent noise attenuation," he said.
Multicomponent technology also is of interest, and Huffman said it's an area where significant advances are being made. "It's going to have an impact on several problems that we've had in both deepwater and other environments, including multiple attenuation, shallowwater flow prediction, seeing through gas chimneys, fluid vs. lithology, etc.," he said.
However, multicomponent acquisition also made the potential "blind alley" list. "There is both R&D and field trials that indicate that we may be able to get the same basic information out of long offset data for property estimation of lithology and fluids (as from multicomponent acquisition)," said Bob Laing, manager of subsurface characterization at Chevron. "Conventional recording, with long offsets and better implementation of propagation theory, might provide the same information at considerably less cost. But it's way too early to know."
Seismic processing also is undergoing some transformations as compute power continues to increase at astonishing rates. Conoco recently announced the installation of a geophysical supercomputer, which in reality is a series of Intel-Linux clusters integrating advanced tape robotics and 10 terabytes of hard disk storage. "One of the drivers for going the Intel-Linux route rather than the supercomputers is that the cost of computing for those systems is going down linearly, and the cost of conventional supercomputers is not; it's staying high," said Huffman. "The second thing is that the amount of computing power needed to do some of these sophisticated algorithms is going up rapidly. So if you're going to keep the machine power growing, you can't do that with a cost basis that's flat.
"I would predict that over the next 5 years we're going to see a new generation of CPUs, what I call hyper-computers, that are 1,000 times the speed of what we're currently using."
Gains in seismic interpretation also are aided by compute power. "One of the technologies that's really getting into full swing in our industry now but has been out there for quite awhile is 3D prestack depth migration," Bahorich said. "With the massively parallel machines now available, the cost has come down dramatically, and it's becoming a part of a typical workflow. That's adding a lot of value."
Finally, Bahorich mentioned the use of neural networks for pattern recognition is becoming more common. The industry is finding a variety of applications for the technology, from classifying seismic wave forms to actually trying to make predictions of different geologic layers.
Integration and visualization
When being interviewed for this article, Laing said he hadn't used the term "exploration technology" in quite some time. This is because the oil industry is attempting to become more seamless, bringing in multidisciplinary teams to solve reservoir problems. But until recently those efforts were hampered by an inability to speak the same language and integrate such diverse types of data as wireline, production and geophysical data.
New technology is changing that, and Laing said a better ability to integrate data into a common earth model is making a difference. "Before, you might have done a geophysical interpretation and then a geological interpretation, with various interpretations that somebody at the end integrates," he said. "Now you're really going back to basic data and integrating at that level. It improves the interpretation and also the cross-disciplinary understanding."
Visualization technology has made a tremendous difference in this understanding. At Shell, a drive is on to connect the company's visualization centers remotely so virtual asset teams can work on the same problem from different locations. "We're very keen to develop these on common standards such that they can talk to each other, so we can have virtual meetings in these visionary caves," Warren said. "This will enable the true experts to engage in discussions with the field operators who are developing broader skills so that you can actually get the deep expertise input to some of the more difficult decisions.
"They're all looking at the same picture, the same dataset. And they're talking in their natural language. In fact, it's taking videoconferencing to a totally different level."
Added John Hopkins, vice president of exploration and production technology for Conoco, "That's probably the bigger secret than the technology itself; it's the interaction and interplay of all of the disciplines that go into exploration."
Exploration drilling
Despite the huge strides being made in seismic and other technology, this part of the process accounts for only a small part of the total cash spent on field development. A much larger chunk comes in the drilling of exploration wells, particularly in hostile environments such as deep water. Companies are considering a move away from huge exploration wells meant to double as production wells to smaller wells that are intended strictly for data gathering.
Shell is honing the concept of a monobore well and plans to drill the first one in 2003. Using expandable tubular technology, the monobore will be a single-dimensional well, not a well that's 30in. at the top telescoping down in diameter as it gets deeper. "That has a huge impact on the logistics and cost, the flexibility and reach," Warren said. "For an exploration well that you aren't putting at risk and don't necessarily want to tie back to production, drilling a small hole all the way reduces the amount of steel you have to put in the ground, reduces the amount of mud you have to produce to drill the well, reduces the amount of cuttings that you generate from the subsurface, all of which have huge effects on logistics and cost.
"What's even more important is that those monobore well designs allow you to go on reaching. There is no finite end you can encounter."
Conoco is exploring a concept called subsea mudlift, also known as dual-gradient drilling. This will allow operators to drill in water depths of 10,000ft (3,050m) and explore parts of the world where the fracture gradient and the pore pressure gradient are very closely spaced together.
Logging technology also holds continued promise. Warren cited "deep-look" applications that can see farther away from the wellbore as well as nuclear magnetic resonance logging, which he called "an unplumbed but very fertile technology for the future." Bahorich added logging-while-drilling (LWD) is, in some cases, allowing companies to completely replace their wireline runs with LWD information. "The dry hole cost comes down to the point where we can now drill exploration wells that were previously not economic," he said.
It will behoove oil companies to stay abreast of these and other developments. One of the recurring concerns of these gurus is the pressure to not take a wrong turn or get left behind in the technology race. "Where the high risk is, and the high reward, are the technologies that truly change the game, the technologies that the average person looks on as an unconventional technology without realizing that it's the conventional technology of tomorrow," Warren said. "The industry is incredibly poor at recognizing these breakthroughs. The marketplace goes to the companies who are able to move these things to being the conventional of today rather than the unconventional of today faster than others.
"It's quite interesting when you think about it - some of the most interesting breakthroughs in technology are actually developed to solve marginal problems. A company has a problem it becomes fixated on that requires a radical solution, and the actual radical solution is developed for a very small marketplace. Part of innovation is seeing those solutions growing in funny marketplaces and being able to translate them into a larger marketplace."