The two groups with "physicist" in their job titles would like to see more focus on rocks and less focus on silos.

As with many of the oil industry's bright ideas, multidisciplinary asset teams haven't quite lived up to their promise. It might seem to an outsider that it's all about the same thing, really - using science to take measurements of the subsurface to find the most likely hiding places for oil and gas and then using more science to produce as much of the oil and gas as possible. But in reality the specialization that's enabled the industry to fine-tune these measurements has resulted in disciplines that barely even speak the same language.
During the years, efforts have been made to integrate some of these disciplines. Geologists and geophysicists, for instance, have overcome many of the barriers that separated them before. Other cross-discipline pairings have generally not been as successful, and one of these is between geophysicists and petrophysicists. While both have a keen interest in what lies below the surface, traditional methods of measurement have kept the two apart. And efforts to integrate these measurements have been hampered by issues of seismic scale vs. log scale, inadequate compute power and differences in training and philosophy, among other things.
Hart's E&P invited several petrophysicists and geophysicists to discuss the physics gap and offer suggestions for improvement. Among the guests were Allen Bertagne, head of PGS Reservoir Consultants US; Cary Purdy, a product planning manager in Schlumberger's DecisionPoint group; Tad Smith, manager of petrophysics at Veritas DGC; Rick Mollison, staff scientist for Baker Atlas; Bob Truman, senior director of marketing for Baker Atlas; David Eickhoff, advanced senior petrophysicist for Marathon Oil's exploration services, worldwide exploration; and Peter Duncan, chief operating officer of Chroma Energy. Bertagne and Duncan are geophysicists; the rest have a petrophysical background. Here's what they had to say.

Smith: I use the term "petrophysicist" somewhat reluctantly, because in my mind it conjures up for a lot of people "log analyst," which is a somewhat misleading term. When work comes to us, clients talk about doing the petrophysics, but in reality they're really talking about log analysis. Even though there is oftentimes good log-to-seismic integration going on, there's a whole lot more value we can add as petrophysicists that is not being captured.
Eickhoff: How many petrophysicists out there are skilled to do that kind of work?
Smith: I think very few. It's highly specialized, and there are a lot of pitfalls. It takes many years to become competent at the sort of things that we're doing.
Eickhoff: You say it's highly specialized, but look at the level of activity in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico and West Africa. All of that ties around petrophysical and geophysical integration. That's a healthy chunk of our work.
To me, rock physics should be a larger portion of our workload. But what I see on the petrophysical side is not enough people with the proper skills.
Duncan: You're saying that on the petrophysical side, people are still concentrating on just counting pay?
Purdy: Look where the drivers are. Have you ever heard of a geophysicist saying, "I wish those petrophysicists would help us with our rock physics?" If they go in and find an extra couple feet of pay, that's an immediate benefit. There's an immediate return on the investment. That's where they see the benefit.
Duncan: When you're counting pay you've already drilled the well. It's already too late. It's when you're shooting seismic that you've got the opportunity to employ an understanding of the rock physics.
Purdy: I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying that I challenge to you find a geophysical manager in any of these major companies that is wanting to add petrophysicists to the headcount.
Eickhoff: How about skill sets?
Duncan: Once you call him a "rock physicist," the manager might add the person. More and more I think they're expecting the interpretive geophysicists to be able to comprehend rock physics.
Mollison: I see a schism in petrophysics. I think a large part of the traditional load of petrophysics was interfacing with drilling and reservoir engineering, to evaluate the well, get the net pay count, help the reservoir engineer characterize production testing, that sort of thing. On the other hand, I have been a part of special studies and task forces and deepwater teams back in the '80s with AVO and rock properties. But that seemed to be a downtime in the industry when there wasn't a whole lot of drilling going on, and as soon as things picked up, there I was back in operations again because that's where they needed petrophysicists
I'd like to ask a question of the geophysicists - do you find that petrophysicists tend to look for the "engineering solution," the published equations and methodologies, and are they weak in first principles types of science? Is that why there's not a lot of interaction?
Duncan: I don't think that as a whole the discipline is any worse off than geophysics. The fact is that there are a lot of seismic processors who don't pay any attention to first principles and the physical processes that we deal with. There are a lot of seismic processors who don't pay any attention to the geology. There are lots of seismic interpreters who don't pay any attention to the first principles of the datasets that they're working on and end up with all sorts of problems because of that. It's along the same lines as your petrophysicist who interprets data without understanding first principles. It's a widespread problem amongst all of our disciplines.
People should really take the time to ask the fundamental questions - what am I learning from this process? - and make sure that the people around the table are really understanding what each is bringing to the solution. Then they begin to see it as real exploration in the pure sense of the word, not just finding oil and gas but a real detective problem.
Bertagne: I think as we look 30 years out there will be subsurface specialists that will have to know about all of this. They'll have to know as much petrophysics as you guys know and as much geophysics as the processing geophysicists know, as much interpretation as the interpreter knows, and on and on. Maybe that's going to need a superhuman person. But in some ways that's really where you'd have to get to, where a petrophysicist is comfortable not just preparing the edits and then turning them over; that he's actually comfortable loading the data into the seismic workstation, picking the event, making amplitude maps, doing the AVO analysis, etc. That's going to take superhuman people or maybe huge databases and better knowledge management. But that's the only way you're going to close that gap. I don't know if we'll have time for any relaxation.
Mollison: I think with the current industry trend there will only be one explorationist in each group 30 years from now anyway.
Bertagne: There will only be 308 people in the entire industry!
Truman: That's an area that I'm really concerned with. I find it very difficult to learn everything that you need to know to be competent. It's so much handier to have the person in the office next door to you be a reservoir engineer who's not bad on well testing, and you can look at some data and walk it next door and say, "What do you think about this? I think this test may show skin damage" or what have you. That person does a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, and you get some immediate assistance from someone who's fairly competent. That's not solving a world-class problem, but it's something you can at least solve quick and dirty. Through the years it's difficult to keep up on all of the details.
Duncan: The technology has been commoditized, and it's been put into a bin where you can reap the greatest profit from it.
Truman: Once it gets commoditized, the service company can't charge enough money to do a good job if something different turns up. You put on the blinders, you do exactly what is contracted for, you push it out the door, and there's no margin there to say, "I think we need to explore this more. I know this is what they want, but there's something that doesn't match here." In an oil company there used to be that margin.
Smith: I agree that it is difficult to fully evaluate a problem. On the other hand, if you don't chase down difficult problems, you run the risk of getting punished, even though clients don't often want to pay any extra for our added time. The pressure is on to get projects in and out yet still produce a superior product.
And speaking of commoditization, I know what I do is not a commodity, but in my opinion that's how the market treats our services. This has been the hardest lesson to learn on the service side. It's a daily struggle to get the price you know you need and still make money at the end of the day. Bear in mind that most of us in the service sector didn't leave the oil companies for less money than we were previously making, so the costs are still there. But a lot of clients don't want to pay for the expertise, and that's very frustrating.
Truman: When you're outsourcing interpretation work, there are only three factors - time, quality and cost. Where you really get into trouble is when the client wants to specify all three factors. High quality delivered immediately for practically nothing. The fact of the matter is, the only model that works is where the client names two of those three, and the service company names the third. If a client wants high quality for little money, the service company controls the time, which may be never. It is hard to communicate and establish a good business model that works to the benefit of the client and not to the detriment of the service company.
As a result, service work isn't very profitable from the service company point of view, and so they make their money doing data acquisition work, and the service work is what they do to qualify for the data acquisition work. This makes it difficult to do quality work.

Hart's E&P: What's your vision of the future?
Mollison: As long as the market stays a commodity market, it will continue to contract.
Duncan: My perspective is that things are getting a lot better. For instance, I recently worked through a new software package, and it taught me a lot about the unknowns in the reservoir. Twenty years ago I probably wouldn't have been able to get the information available in that package. I would have had to go to several different courses and be mentored by several different people. Now that knowledge has been accumulated in a single location that is available for a very small amount of money, and if I take the time to work through it, I may not become an expert, but at least I begin to understand the problem. The ability to accumulate information in a single location and the availability of a tool that will allow you to test a hypothesis based on sound fundamental principles is going to make all of us empowered if we can just find the time to do it. As the economics drive things, the science will catch up. The science is waiting in the wings.
Truman: You've heard us complain about all the issues involved, but I agree completely with Peter that if you look at the long-term trend, it has gotten better. The frustrating thing is that if you look at the time it takes the oil and gas business to introduce and accept technology, it's about 10 years. I think some of the frustration you see is that long time constant, how long it takes to effect a change within the industry. But if you look back over the last 20 or 30 years, we've seen continuous improvement.
Eickhoff: I agree that some of the biggest strides have been made in the software side of the business. The petrophysical software I use now will do an Archie water saturation, a Gassmann fluid substitution and calculate elastic impedance. This was not possible 10 years ago. And I agree with Bob that if you look at the long-term trend, we're moving in the right direction.
Purdy: Somebody had a slide and measured the different industries and how quick they were to adopt new technology, and the oil industry ranked lower than grade schools. We're a little slow on the uptake. But I think that's why we're moving back towards science - because the software is taking care of the integration for us.
Bertagne: We've been talking about the world running out of oil for tens of years, and somehow we've always developed a new technology. Maybe we didn't know what we were going to do, but somehow we rose to the occasion and delivered the goods. As an industry there's probably no reason why we won't rise to the occasion again. We sit here today, and it seems slow, and we're not sure what we'll be doing in 5 years, where the tools will be, but I've got to think that we will come through when all is said and done.

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