Scarcely an interview with a service company goes by without the age-old complaint about how slow oil and gas companies are to try new technology.

And it’s true — some ground-breaking technologies, notably 3-D seismic, were years in the testing phase before becoming accepted and finally expected by shareholders.

In exploration, this seems like a two-sided coin. On the one hand, explorationists should be risk-takers, ready to try anything that might help them find more oil. On the other hand, when they do find something that gives them a competitive advantage, they have very little incentive to broadcast this to the world.

But beyond that I think there is a more basic element to the problem, at least on the exploration and delineation side of things. I’ve written about several new technologies over the years that seem poised to take off but do so more slowly than expected. And I’m beginning to see some correlations in their early lackluster acceptance.

The first is nuclear magnetic resonance logging, or NMR. I wrote about this technology in August 2000, commenting at the time, “The next big step will be an acceptance by the oil industry that this tool is no longer a high-tech, niche player in the great scheme of logging tools. It can provide answers that no other tool can provide, dramatically changing the way wells are completed and reservoirs are developed.

“It just needs better public relations.”
It also needed a training program. While most major companies have experts who understand NMR tools, incorporating the additional information into a standard workflow was time-consuming and sometimes distracted log analysts from their ability to make timely assessments of logging records. It was also possible to spend too much money and get way more information than was really needed.

Multicomponent seismic is another example. While this type of seismic measurement provides vast amounts of additional information, it also provides vast amounts of additional raw data which have to be processed and interpreted. I first wrote about multicomponent seismic in our launch issue in October 1999; almost 8 years later it’s still a niche tool that many companies have no real concept of how to use.

There’s nothing wrong with either of these technologies, and there’s nothing wrong with the companies that supply them or the tools that take the measurements. I would also add that there’s nothing wrong with the oil companies that don’t use them other than the fact that they simply don’t have time to learn how to use them efficiently and cost-effectively. New information is a good thing, but workflow disruption can be a high price to pay.

Enter, then, a new exploration technology, electromagnetics (EM). You’ll find an entire feature on EM starting on page 49. It is a technology that’s being more rapidly accepted than some of its predecessors, but the same issues apply — where does the new information fit into the workflow, and how can it best be applied? Luckily many in the EM domain come from either a wireline logging or a seismic background, so they’re familiar with the learning curve required to introduce a new measurement into the mix.

New EM application?
This just in — there’s more to EM than just finding oil and gas, apparently. A new book, “The Secret,” promises nothing less than complete life transformation by applying the law of attraction, “the most powerful law in the universe,” according to author Rhonda Byrne. Byrne insists that one need merely imagine what one wants, and that person’s electromagnetic field will attract that thing.

So does it work? Byrne claims that using The Secret helped her give up reading glasses, even though she’s 55.

I am speechless with amazement.
I’m sure this phenomenon will completely revolutionize the search for oil and gas — if we can ever incorporate it into our workflows.

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