Snapshot of Our
Workstation
(A personal view from our developer, Steven I. Rothman)
We are often
asked: "What makes the Zavanna Workstation so special?"
You might have spent money to equip your geologists with commercial
workstations, and have good reason to question us. Unfortunately,
it is very difficult to describe our workstation -- without any
doubt, the best answer is for you to have a demonstration. We
will show you actual applications of our technology, not with
canned illustrations, but with live action.
If you doubt
us, please give us the chance to show you what you have been
missing. If you have never seen a workstation, you are in for
a treat. Or, if you are familiar with your own workstation, then
come for some fun (we enjoy talking with people who have "computerized"
already ). We are looking for strong joint venture partners in
exploration, and we want you to know exactly what we can achieve
together.
Yet before
you meet with us, you want us to make an attempt to answer the
question, what's so special? The quick answer is that we do more:
probably more than 90% of our work is difficult or impossible
to do on a commercial workstation. Therefore, we can consider
aspects of the data that have never been explored. Thus we transform
data into new information. We are on new ground, not following
old paths.
It is similar
to the several enhancements of seismic over the past fifty years:
each successive improvement in the seismic tool brought to view
obvious anticlines, just begging to be drilled. Those fields
were missed before, because the earlier seismic tools could not
detect them. Similarly, we bring a new exploration tool to the
geologist. Our proprietary workstation allows our geologists
to look at the data in a new way, and to see what has been missed
before. Please understand that our strength is in looking in
areas that have already been explored. It is axiomatic: we all
know that the best place to find oil is in the oil patch. That
is exactly where we are looking and we fully expect to find individual
wells and entire fields which had been missed until now.
Why is our
workstation a "new tool"? Why can ours be used to explore
where others cannot go? Let me take an analogy from the title.
Everyone knows how to take a snapshot, but only a few people
are able to operate a professional SLR camera and fewer still
are able to develop and print film in a darkroom. Bear with me
a moment. I am telling you not about geology, but about process,
about method, and about something special. Buying a commercial
workstation is like buying a box camera, but joining with us
is like having a professional photographer with his own camera
and darkroom. Which is better? Well, if you want to take a picture
of the Grand Canyon, simply press the button, and you have a
snapshot. If you are really good, you will give your attention
to composition and lighting. It may be pretty. But you only have
a snapshot. Many people have taken that shot before, so it probably
won't be enough. Not to win a prize. We are after the prize.
Continuing
my analogy, the professional photographer will not just press
a button. He can adjust shutter speed, F-stop, film speed, lens
length, daylight filters. In the darkroom, he can vary the length
and intensity of the exposure, he can change the composition
of the light. With these and other techniques, he can bring out
textures and colors and details that your eye never noticed.
A snapshot, instead, tends to lose these details. The professional
photographer can stretch the contrast or use false colors or
vary the focus to produce new information, to show what you never
could have seen. Now you can see the dew drops, or the animal
tracks, or the strata.
With stratigraphy
we are back to geology. In my analogy, a commercial workstation
can take snapshots, but the Zavanna Workstation can take professional
photographs. Our geologists are expert users of a workstation
that provides what is called "a rich tool environment".
We start with a statistical overview of the basins, identifying
those with most exploration potential, and within each, the target
horizons. These are not simply the horizons that have produced
the most oil, but rather those that have the most oil yet to
be found.
Next, we
build an exploration database, typically from the uniting of
three completely different data sources. Often we hear that a
commercial workstation can do this also. No, it cannot. Any commercial
relational database can simply swallow everything that you throw
at it. But, that is a database only in the sense a filing cabinet:
you might have stored the dictionary in the commercial workstation,
but it still cannot write poetry. The Zavanna Workstation does
not swallow everything; on the contrary, it examines data from
a basis of geological meaning. We are not creating a library,
where you can retrieve scout tickets. Instead, for example, each
core, drilling, DST, and perforation test is analyzed by what
is termed an "expert" system, and its results are related
to the horizon picks and to the lithology.
And we know
absolutely that we are different, because we have found errors
in the commercial databases. Errors that an ordinary workstation
has no trouble swallowing, as it obeys the infamous rule that
has always plagued computers, "garbage in, garbage out".
But our expert system complains and identifies these errors,
and we investigate. As I write this, my next project is to track
down an error that I just found last night: retrievals from a
major commercial database gave bogus locations for hundreds of
wells. Their software has a bug that falsely reports lat/lng
whenever the actual location is absent from the database. Bad
data is poison! It is worse than no data at all. How many maps
have been made using these incorrectly placed wells? By contrast,
much of my code examines the data and reports to the user. We
strive to ensure good data.
The next
step is to generate a series of explorationist's reports. Since
the workstation is our own, we can create anything we can define
in our minds. One of our strengths is the direct and effective
communication between geologist and computer systems analyst.
Some of the reports are certainly odd. And most are impossible
on a commercial workstation. For example, we are curious about
the wildcat success rate of different operators, and, further,
whether certain operators have had their dry holes successfully
offset. For a particular target horizon, we want to know how
thick the sand is in dry and in producing wells and how far below
the top. And does a good DST often suggest a good perforation?
Or should a poor DST be ignored for this horizon? Is the bottom
hole temperature higher for producers? Is the sand thicker? Is
the isopach thinner? These and many other questions can be asked
of the entire database, or of any subset.
Statistics
is the branch of mathematics that deals most directly with large
amounts of data. We look for significant relationships among
structures and isopachs, we model surfaces, we use discriminant
functions. The workstation is designed to interchange data with
DataDesk, the best program in the world for the "exploratory
data analysis", and also with SpyGlass, the best program
for data visualization (commonly used to display the results
of physics and chemistry models run on supercomputers). Workstation
reports are available to Microsoft®
Word and Excel, and maps and postings are exported to Canvas.
In this manner, the Macintosh®
platform serves to enhance the value of my programs, allowing
me to concentrate on geology.
I have written
about as much as I care to do, and I have not even touched upon
the extract, logic, and mapping capabilities of the workstation.
We probably can produce about five times as many types of maps
as any commercial workstation. And we can create an even greater
number of postings. We can show you wells that are surrounded
by shallower producers, or anticlines that might hide an elephant.
The Zavanna Workstation is a new tool, and in the hands of our
expert users, it can extend the geologist's reach, it can expand
his imagination, his creativity. The ideas, the direction of
investigation, the exploration, and the conclusions are all his
own. The workstation does not itself explore, it frees the geologist
to do so. The prospects will be examined by detailers according
to the most stringent industry standards. The results will stand
on their own.
