What used to be called the "black art" of discovering and producing oil gets a little less mysterious every day, thanks to advances in geophysics, geology, and petroleum engineering. Unfortunately, the art of communication between scientists in these three areas hasn't evolved as quickly. The traditional competition between geophysicists, geologists, and petroleum engineers has kept them from being willing collaborators.
There are many historical, political, and technical reasons why "group think" has been impractical among scientists in the oil industry. But today, economic factors dictate that they begin to share their ideas. And fortunately, exciting new technology is now available to help foster that cooperation.
The idea of integrating the exploration techniques of different fields of science arose as the circumstances of oil exploration changed over the past decade. In the past, oil fields were generally larger – – hence easier to find – – than they are today. At proven sites, oil companies cold drill step-out wells with a high probability of success. Today, high-yield sites are scarcer and more careful analysis of the data at hand is required at each prospective drilling site to accurately delineate me boundaries of the reservoir.
Technical advances during the past ten years have improved the quality and accuracy of data interpretation. Mainframe-equivalent processing power is now available in desktop packaging. Graphics products can provide fast, interactive, 3-D color display. Mass storage devices can store the equivalent of the Library of Congress on a few dozen 9-inch disks. Moreover, the cost of technology has continued to decline while performance capabilities have consistently increased. The same processing power that would have cost more than $100,000 in 1979 can be purchased for less than $5,000 today.
Simply put, the increasing economic risk of petroleum exploration and production has created a need for better drilling decisions and higher reservoir yields. Improvements in technology have fostered gains in both areas. However, oil companies are recognizing that the promise of technology extends far beyond increasing the efficiency of individual scientists and researchers. By setting up powerful computer networks – – connecting geophysicists, geologists, and petroleum engineers electronically – – they can, for the first time, create effective "exploration/production teams" which bring the skills and experience of each professional to bear on the common problem. It is often a substantial task to extract data from the various dissimilar databases, translate that data into a neutral format, and subsequently build a single common database of all the different data sets. The key to the exploration/production team is somehow making all relevant data easily available to each team member simultaneously while still ensuring the integrity of the data itself. Several approaches to this goal have been tested and they've met with varying degrees of success.
One approach involves creating a shared database from multiple proprietary databases and making this common database accessible to the various team members across a network. For example, seismic data can be integrated with the database of well logs; various geologic maps and other databases, such as ownership and lease records and production histories, can be combined into a common database.
