Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By JAY E. VALUSEK
server. "Their annual bill for offsite storage was huge," he said. "It was costing more than a million dollars a year to store well data that few people were using . . . But old habits die hard. They didn't want to throw the paper away." "Traditional managers feel good walking into a gigantic file room, seeing all those well logs on a shelf," added Dennis Comis, chief information officer for Houston-based Frontera Resources. "They think they have an asset there -- at Frontera, we think all they have is a paper jungle." Founded three years ago, Frontera Resources took a radically paperless approach to data management from the beginning. All technical documents -both raw materials and final output such as well logs, maps, photographs, cross sections and engineering reports -- are scanned, indexed and stored on network file servers, accessible to all E&P professionals and partners via the company's extranet. "Smart rasters form an integral part of the overall plan," Comis said. "Well logs are the building blocks we put into our (vendor's) software to make a cross section. Then we create an output file of that cross section, a digital replication, and upload it to a folder on the extranet. "When our people are overseas, 15,000 miles away, they can log onto the Internet, go to that folder and download the file," he continued. "If they need to, they can plot a hard-copy version for a presentation or offsite meeting." However, even when users print a paper copy, they usually throw it away afterward. "We have no file rooms or file clerks," Comis said. "Frontera has gone into places like Azerbaijan and Georgia and evaluated pretty much the whole country's asset base by being able to quickly and efficiently scan logs, maps and other data," he said. "With knowledgeable people, we create value from a simple scanned image.
Case Studies
Smart raster well logs are used today in a wide variety of basins, plays and projects, notably in: The East Texas Cotton Valley Reef play. The South Mississippi Tuscaloosa trend. The Morrow formation of southeastern New Mexico. Regional exploration in South Louisiana. Field studies in the Permian Basin. International operations in Azerbaijan and Georgia. The number of wells involved ranged from 100 to 30,000. Projects most likely to use the technology are those areas with little or no digital well log data available -- and either too many wells to correlate or too many geological interpretations to generate using traditional paper methods. "When you go into a new country, there is no digital data. You have to make it yourself," Comis said. "In our Georgian operations, for example, we started with all raster logs, and did lots of evaluations with them. It's an evolutionary process. Now we have all digital data. "In Azerbaijan, I'd say 85 percent of our data is raster, 15 percent is digital." Hilcorp Energy's Mathis recalled using the technology in early 1996, when he was "starting out from scratch" in the East Texas basin and had to evaluate that area quickly. "But we had no digitized well logs," he said. "I knew sliding logs on top of a drafting table wasn't going to cut it."
Apply color, annotations and other graphics to plot presentation sections. "Productivity improvements are significant," Mathis said. "I can literally make a cross section and take a finished product to the plotter in 15 minutes, 30 at most. To make the same cross section with paper logs could easily have taken several hours or days." Mathis adds that the technology is "not as big as 3-D seismic yet," but it is a growing market.