Journal of Petroleum Technology, Vol.47, No.6, 510-511, 1995
Brief - Digitizing Rocks - Standardizing the Process of Geologic Description with Workstations
In the drive to squeeze the most value from every dollar spent on exploration and development, increasing use is being made of stored data through methods that rely on the completeness and accuracy of the database for their usefulness. Although many types of engineering data are available to the process, geologic data, especially those collected at a sufficiently detailed level to show reservoir heterogeneity, are often unavailable to later workers in any useful form. Traditionally, most wellsite geologic data are recorded on worksheets or notebooks, from which summary data are often transferred to computers. The only changes in recent years have been related to the process by which computer-drafted lithology logs have superseded hand-drawn logs; in some exceptions, some of the plotting data may be held in a simple database. These descriptions and analyses, gathered at considerable cost and capable of showing significant petrological detail, are not available to the whole field-development process. We set out to tackle these problems of limited usefulness and developed a system that would deliver quality geologic data deep into the field of play in a form that was easy to select and integrate with existing models.