The end of the cold war and the simultaneous explosion of computer science technologies have produced an extraordinary opportunity for improvements in the efficiency by which the International Petroleum Industry conducts its exploration and production business. On the exploration side, anti-submarine warfare, combined with ever expanding super-computer capabilities have offered technologies that have the potential to truly open new plays, particularly beneath salt and basalt of the deep and ultra-deepwater. For example, Trident submarine stealth navigation requirements produced the world's only operational gravity gradiometer, which can be thought of as measuring 3D, or directional, density variations in the subsurface. The Navy steers submarines with this instrument without emitting any detectable signal. Bell Aerospace, the Pentagon, and Columbia University joined forces to declassify and adapt this extraordinary measurement device to oil exploration applications. Bell Geospace is marketing it, currently only in the Gulf of Mexico, but next year, in the North Sea, as well. The Bell instrument measures the full tensor of the earth's gravitational field every 2 seconds in a tumbling “binacle”. Accelerometers, coupled with an accurate inertial navigation system, produce the directional differences in gravity that the instrument detects. The gravity tensor, in turn, has excellent vertical boundary resolution and augments another spectacular seismic technology, which images horizontal boundaries well — pre-stack depth migration. The key technological innovation that has made pre-stack depth migration possible has been the tremendous expansion in parallel supercomputer cycle capability. Literally hundreds of processors now can reposition acoustic reflectivity voxel-by-voxel within an earth volume before it is migrated to stack out the noise and enhance the signal. The combination of these two new technologies has allowed the industry to image beneath both salt and basalt that are obscuring large areas of the seafloor like the deepwater Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea extension west of the Shetlands.

On the production side, two emerging technologies for imaging bypassed oil and gas and then hitting those targets with the drillbit come from military and computational breakthroughs of recent years. Seismic re-ensonification of an oil field, over and over again, as production proceeds is termed 4D, or time-lapse, seismic monitoring. Many technologies related to discovering and tracking enemy submarines are 4D as well. One is a focused, conical source, produced by GTE/BBN, that sends a broadband, focused 1-1000 hertz sound burst that expands only within a 30 degree cone. This source could be used to ensonify only the troubled segment of a large oil field, say, to understand the source of an unwanted water incursion. Then the information coming in from such a 4D survey is gigabits per day, and each time-lapse image must be normalized and then compared with previous seismic cubes. The meaning of dimming and brightening of seismic reflections over time must then be understood through matching the observed changes with fluid flow reservoir simulators and 3D seismic forward models. Computer capabilities have expanded fast enough to be able to now manipulate differences among these large datasets in real time on very large workstations and parallel super-computers. Up to one billion nodes of a finite element mesh will soon be required to properly match observed and modeled 4D changes caused by fluid movements within reservoirs (we are up to 10s of million now). However, as we develop these new targets of by passed pay, we must hit them with the drillbit if we are to product them to the surface. Again, military-developed, inertial navigation technologies have made it into the oil industry to make that possible. Multi-lateral, often horizontal, well completions have unquestionably given us the capability to increase in a fundamental way the recovery efficiency with which we drain oil and gas fields, and by a significant amount.

More than 20 case studies of 4D seismic reservoir monitoring from around the world are producing 10+/-5% increases in the recovery percentage of original-oil-in-place, which can amount to an increase of 10 million barrels per day in worldwide production by the year 2005 (we now produce about 65 mmbbl/d). this increase must be managed in a business sense, because considerably more must be expended up front in a field's history to produce more later on, using 4D technologies (it adds about $1/bbl to producing costs, but produces 10% more total oil from a field). Luckily, farfield financial technologies are also beginning to encroach into the oil industry that will help us better manage the intelligent expendature of funds for emerging technologies. Wall Street has developed computational codes that compute the “efficient frontier” of a company's business by simultaneously accounting for Return-on-Capital-Employed, Growth, Net Cash Flow, and Asset Value. This methodology treats properties is a coherent Portfolio, and Manages the allocation of funds to plan the attainment of the company's profit metrics several years in advance. This Portfolio Management is an essential addition to the business because it brings techniques for the proper utilization of emerging technologies such as the above. For example, all assets within all business units want to apply the same new technologies all at once (once they have been proven to work). Priorities have to be set.

Far more research and development funds are expended each year by the military, medical, financial, and computer industries than cound ever be spent by the oil industry, so adaption of far-field technologies becomes an inevitable result of more outreach by enlightened management. For example, up to $700 billion is being invested worldwide in 1997 on developments involving JAVA, and the entire oil industry could not influence the progress or direction of this development wave even if it tried Yet, we will soon benefit from it, if we keep our eyes and ears tuned to the farfield. In conclusion, the receptiveness of the oil industry to adaption of outside technologies is an encouraging sign of improvement in the business.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90937©1998 AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition, Salt Lake City, Utah