New desktop technology features speed break through
by Ken d'Albenas

Renjun Wen knew he was on to something big.

In his post-doctoral work in the early 1990s, applying geostatistics to hydrocarbon reservoirs, he found himself developing new science and algorithms to address some common problems in reservoir delineation and exploitation.

Why were the available tools so coarse and poorly discriminating, requiring gross assumptions that resulted in correspondingly gross errors? Why were there no tools at all to estimate or optimally exploit many complex clastic reservoirs? What were the wireline logs missing? What were the core analyses missing?

His applied research turned out new concepts and technology to bridge the gap between centimetre-scale measurements on core and sidewall plugs, and the many-metre-scale grids of reservoirs. Then came algorithms to analyze seismic attributes and their interrelationships mathematically, capitalizing on them to expose reservoir sands that conventional techniques couldn't see.

And within a few short years, Wen was at the head of a multinational software and services company, an acclaimed innovator in seismic exploration and reservoir modeling software. That company would enter the new century at the centre of a global R&D consortium of energy companies comprising StatoilHydro, ConocoPhillips, BHP Billiton, ExxonMobil, Total, Eni, Shell, and Hydro.

The company that Wen founded in 1996 is Calgary-based Geomodeling Technology Corp. Driven by a small army of Ph.D's and software engineers, it now has three main software packages: SBED, the core technology that started it all; SBEDStudio for geological scenario modelling; and VisualVoxAt, a 3-D seismic interpretive package that goes far beyond simple horizon picking and mapping.

All three are desktop applications that support geologists, geophysicists, and engineers as they explore new and old prospects. All three help to answer the questions that are asked in every office and every boardroom in our industry: “How can we detect and address our reservoir targets faster?” “How can we maximize our reservoir returns?” “How can we find that prospect that has gone unnoticed by others?”

Beyond semblance

The latest development from Geomodeling that has the industry abuzz is VisualVoxAt's new “volume curvature”. “As a new type of attribute, volume curvature has the potential to make the same kind of impact that semblance and coherence cubes made in the '90s, says Murray Christie, Geomodeling's COO and one of the drivers of the new technology". VisualVoxAt lets geophysicists visualize multiple-attribute seismic volumes in 3-D, easily analyze waveforms, compute a phantasmagoria of attributes, correlate them, and interpret subtle structure and stratigraphy at multiple seismic resolutions. Its users have found that it greatly reduces uncertainty, increases productivity, and saves time - and money.

3-D rendering of multiple geophysical attributes and geological features in VisualVoxAt

But volume curvature is in a league of its own. It grabs every listener's attention right away because, for starters, it leapfrogs past the conventional horizon-picking stage of seismic interpretation, and looks at a 3-D seismic data volume as a whole. Interpreters have been making use of surface curvature attributes for some time, but volume curvature is especially useful in areas where surfaces are difficult or impractical to interpret. And the software's 3-D visualization capabilities make it easy for the interpreter to grasp those volumes and zoom through faults and fractures.

3-D volume curvature rendering in VisualVoxAt

One of Geomodeling's breakthroughs is speed. Its volume curvature computations are breathtakingly fast compared to traditional methods of computation.

“You don't need a supercomputer now,” says Christie, so workers can experiment productively at their desktops with different wavelengths, window sizes, and cross-plots. Using multiple CPUs where available, volume curvature gives improved mapping of faults and fractures, and better understanding of folds and associated fractures. It supplements and improves the ability of semblance and other volume attributes to reveal geologic meaning. And it doesn't require a surface to be interpreted first. For more information, visit www.geomodeling.com