Visualization technology in the exploration segment of the oil and gas industry is no longer the new shiny toy. Many companies have adopted the technology as a way for asset teams to collaborate and interact with their geophysical data to improve their understanding of the reservoir.

But for the past few years, a start-up company called TerraSpark quietly has been taking the visualization concept to new, and what some might say disruptive, extremes. Founded by Geoff Dorn, who took ARCO’s visualization technology to the University of Colorado after BP purchased his company, TerraSpark has been pioneering innovative solutions to image complex faulting and deepwater subsalt plays. Its domain transformation technology removes all of the structure from a seismic volume so interpreters can view the original depositional features of the play.

Since March 2010, when the company got investment money from Limerock Partners, TerraSpark has grown from eight to 20 employees and has opened a second office in Houston. It was time to take the company from a pure R&D player to a software solutions provider. Dorn hired Bob Stevenson, who has worked for some of the industry’s most influential software providers, to serve as COO for TerraSpark as it takes its next logical step. Stevenson was lured to TerraSpark by the commercialization opportunities. “When I got the demonstration of the product, I could see the power in it, and I could also see the challenges involved in getting this kind of a solution into the commercial phase,” he said.

One of the primary challenges in commercializing software, Stevenson said, is to make it more user-friendly. Another issue is to help potential clients wrap their brains around the potential of the technology.

“This is wonderful technology that can do things that people said can’t be done,” he said. “It’s a great technology, but we have to understand the interpreters’ challenges and problems and show them how the technology can help them in that realm.”

Dorn added that ever since computers became exploration tools, they have mostly been used to convert what once was done on paper into a computing environment. “We’re trying to change how people approach interpretation at a basic level,” he said. “Interpreters should always be working in 3-D with complete surfaces. That’s quite a leap for them to make.”

Already TerraSpark has some early adopter “believers,” including True Oil, which has been pursuing an oil shale play in North America. The success of wells in this area hinges on the ability to identify regions with a high density of natural fractures. True geoscientists used a combination of TerraSpark’s high-resolution fault imaging technology and an attribute called Voxel Density Region Highlighting. This created a volume with clouds of predicted high natural fracture density. True Oil’s geoscientists then used TerraSpark’s integrated Well Path Planner to create an initial conceptual well path within the attribute and seismic volumes. After running TerraSpark’s Insight Earth software, True Oil not only drilled a successful well on the new attribute data but also identified a number of other prospects for subsequent drilling in the trend.

“The success of this well vindicates their purchase of our software by providing a successful way to explore for fractures in this play,” Dorn said.

Success stories like that will help with the commercialization process. “It’s a great story,” Stevenson said. “We just need to get out there and show them we have the solution.

“It’s not good enough to show them better, faster, cheaper. We need to have a quantitative leap of benefits to disrupt their current operations.”