Barrels, Bytes, Rocks & Roadtrips

The science of shale drilling

2012-01-19T21:04:00.000-08:00

The Houston Geological Society, which bills itself on its website as “the world’s largest local geological society” (and if Houston continues to hold its place among the five Texas cities in the top ten on the Men’s Health annual list of “America’s Fattest Cities", this may be literally true), held an Environmental and Engineering Dinner meeting on 14-Dec to discuss the technology behind risk mitigation for shale gas development. Anthony Gorody, president of Universal Geoscience Consulting, Inc., has been very involved in baseline groundwater sampling and forensic analysis of stray gas in shallow water wells. This was especially timely given the recent identification in Pavillion, Wyoming of compounds in two deep monitoring wells (see the draft report at: http://www.epa.gov/region8/superfund/wy/pavillion/EPA_ReportOnPavillion_Dec-8-2011.pdf) that the EPA described in their press release as “consistent with gas production”. Mr. Gorody repeated the industry’s stance that relatively few water wells are impacted by drilling operations and that to date there have been no unambiguously documented cases of groundwater contamination directly attributed to hydraulic fracturing itself. Instead, he showed that many issues have been with stray gas being released from insufficient cement jobs rather than completion operations (note even the EPA report references “gas production” first rather than hydraulic fracturing). Compounding the issue is the fact that drilling operations have now moved from areas like Wyoming, where a one mile radius of investigation around a gas well might encounter only two water wells, to populated lands in Pennsylvania, where the same footprint might include up to 60 privately drilled water wells. Gorody noted that hydraulic fracturing is not a new technology (it has been in use since 1947) and showed what may be the best image in the public domain to explain the relationship between the depth of water wells and the depth and extent of hydraulic fracturing, which should allow the general public to understand the physical inability of artificial fractures to propagate to groundwater levels in a play like the Barnett.
He used some basic physics to show that small shale pores are two orders of magnitude smaller than the molecular sizes of larger hydrocarbons, and that fractures must be vertically confined in order to create strain release, and slammed the recent EPA report for confusing “coincidence and collocation with cause and effect”. He gave a rule of thumb that the energy released in a typical fracture job is about the same as dropping a gallon of water from head height, while the audience tried to imagine that amount of energy fracturing over 3000 feet of consolidated rock. The high visibility and impact of shale gas drilling operations, however, with 3-5 million gallons of water being trucked in per well, and highly mobile rigs moving through what used to be rural countrysides, has led many community organizations to cast a skeptical eye on the industry. Gorody emphasized the impact on instrumentation and monitoring technology, showing that pressure plots and noise surveys do not show any evidence of fluid or gas release, that increased sampling and analysis of gas shows is providing a fossilized history of hydrocarbon expulsion in many basins, and that baseline water sampling is providing a boon in data density and data mining for forensic geochemists studying aquifers, paid for by risk-averse and litigation-wary operators. The voluntary and regulatory release of chemical information supports studies that show produced gases are not isotopically the same as gases found in water wells, and that buoyant hydrocarbons from depth escaping from failed casings, uncemented annuli, and compromised casing cement bonds can invade shallow aquifers and re-suspend colloidal complexes and sediments that have normally settled to the bottom of water wells. This creates a reducing environment in the well pump intake port, and the bacterial conversion of toxic sulfides that are then reported as odiferous and noxious. It only takes 87 psi of stray gas to overcome hydraulic head and invade water wells drilled to 200 feet, that is less than the pressure in a standard bicycle tire. Since around 85% of the population can detect sulfides such as H2S at levels of .03 ppm, the population quickly becomes aware of the degradation of their water supply, but Gorody noted that this process is completely independent of the hydraulic fracturing used to complete the well, and that maybe the term “hydraulic fracturing” should not even be used when describing vertical wells. Gorody pointed out that as soon as the annulus is squeezed, the problems with water contamination that occur in the first weeks to months after drilling go away, and that nearby monitoring wells may fail to intersect the tortuous paths used by the stray gas to migrate between the gas producing and water wells. His suggestions for reducing these impacts include monitoring of mud logs for gas shows during drilling, cementing off shallow gas shows to prevent leakage, sampling gas for its isotopic fingerprint during drilling to differentiate it from produced gas, running cement bond logs, and coproducing or venting casinghead gas. In the end, it was very enlightening to hear such a sober, scientific evaluation of the technology being used to track gas in shale plays, as opposed to the usual dialogue in places like mainstream media.

Chevron at the SPE Digital Energy Study Group

2011-12-21T08:10:00.000-08:00

Jim Crompton, Senior IT Advisor for Chevron, addressed the SPE Digital Energy Study Group in Houston on 16-November on the topic of the “Digital Oil Field IT Stack”. He announced that he wanted to address and be a bit provocative about what he described as two recognized barriers that came out of the panel discussions at the SPE ATCE in Denver a couple of weeks before. His experience comes from implementing what he described as “gifts” from the Chevron central organization in diverse business units for real world application. He felt the two unaddressed barriers were change management, and the need for a standard infrastructure and architecture, which he proposed to describe. His presentation started with some standard, but according to him, neglected trends in the expanding scope and role of IT, including increased digitization, a move into plants and fields, and the need to address the latest generation of IT consumers, which he described as the first generation of oilfield workers to have better IT infrastructure in their homes than at work. He acknowledged that in many cases, the “first kilometer” is still a problem, as where an entire offshore field may be instrumented with fibre optics, but the link to the onshore office is still via low bandwidth microwave links (he only half jokingly suggested lack of telcom coverage as a positively correlated indicator for oil occurrence). So how do we leverage the hundreds of thousands of sensors on a new greenfield platform and move from a “run to failure” mode to one of proactive failure detection and avoidance? Jim cited some examples of predictive analytics, Statoil’s experiements with injected nano sensors that report back on reservoir conditions, distributed sensors for real-time optimization, and new mobility platforms for field workers. But the most interesting new idea was that of borrowing sensor mesh architectures from agricultural and military applications to go beyond current de-bottlenecking workflows and address the advanced analytics used by electrical engineers in their instrumentation. He indicated such a robust and cheap architecture “pattern” might be one of maybe half a dozen that an IT group like Chevron’s might use to provide semi-customizable solutions. Part of the frustration he acknowledged was that at least at Chevron, his best Visual Basic programmers are petroleum engineers using Excel, and they are more in touch with MicroSoft development plans than his IT group and upset that the next version of Excel will remove Visual Basic and move it to the Sharepoint platform. Faced with Chevron now having over 20 million Gigabytes of digital data under management, he suggested treating the information pipeline in the same way we manage hydrocarbon pipelines, and trying to prevent “leaks” to unmanaged environments, like Excel. He showed some digital dashboards that could provide a balance between real time surveillance and advanced modeling, mix the needs of mapping and reporting services, and move organizations up the Business Intelligence maturity model. He finished with a quick nod to HADOOP solutions and a need to move away from “creative solutions that only solve when the creator is present”.

A Once in a Thousand Year Event?

2011-02-19T16:15:00.000-08:00

Some new work along the southeastern tip of India shows that the Boxing Day Tsunami was rare, but not unprecedented. Now that scientists know what the erosional remnants of a global tsunami event look like when preserved on the beaches of that coast, they can use Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and sediment cores to look for evidence of other events correlated around the Indian Ocean basin, and use optical methods to come up with dates for them. The latest round of work has identified two previous tsunami records at 1080 years ago (+/- 60 years) and 3710 years ago (+/- 200 years). So yes those of us who witnessed this event were indeed present for an event that starts to bridge the gap between human history and the geologic record.
See: (EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Vol. 91, No. 50, 14-Dec-2010, "Subsurface Images Shed Light on Past Tsunamis in India", Rajesh Nair, Dept. of Ocean Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology)

In the News ... Again

2011-02-19T15:01:00.000-08:00

In following up the scientific response to the BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (yes the media tagged it and it will never be the "Cameron BOP spill" or the "Anadarko Joint Venture spill"), there is some real insight from those who deal every day with complex technological ventures. In a pretty good indication that, yes, scientists are the pragmatic lot that we expect and need them to be, I have now come across at least two admissions in technical and scientific and publications that when it comes to huge expensive undertakings like deep offshore drilling, the next spill is not a matter of if, but when.

When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA)stood up their GeoPlatform website in response to the spill, their CIO was quite candid in noting that they were already planning how the IT infrastructure would have to evolve in order to meet the "next crisis". See:
http://gcn.com/articles/2010/07/15/noaa-cio-kilmavicz.aspx

And Case Western Reserve University has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study an aerogel material that can soak up eight times its weight in oil, and then be wrung out and re-used. The goal is to lower the cost of the gel so it can be used "during the next big spill".

Those who launch people into space, build high energy physics labs, or even integrate complex software suites, and do it under budgetary constraints, live with a harsh reality. The technicians who are even today, as Paul Carter describes in "This is Not a Drill", designing the "whole fleets of brand new sixth generation, fly by wire cyber rigs ... getting spat out of shipyards all over the world at the moment" ... they know it.

When you push the technology to its limits, sooner or later, something will go wrong.

How did this trajectory start?

2011-02-17T21:31:00.001-08:00

In the book that will eventually trace the course of this particular scientist through the global oilfields, speculatively titled "Hold My Beer and Watch This!", I will undoubtedly have to spend some time explaining how a short intellectual kid from Chicago ended up driving a 27-ton Litton Vibrator Truck in Pecos, Texas. In his book "This is Not a Drill: Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield", Paul Carter describes some of the motives that led him to join offshore rig crews; namely wanderlust, camaraderie, and lucrative contracts. Interestingly, these were among the same things listed by Frank "The Irishman" Sheerhan in the book "I Hear you Paint Houses" as reasons for him joining the Mob....
In my case it was not only the prospect of a lucrative job actually using my college degree when the mining business was collapsing around Upper Michigan in the early 1980's, the possibility to work in remote exotic locations (ok, but Pecos?) and knowing I would be working with geoscientists who I already knew to be a friendly and jovial lot, but the fact that at that time, oil companies were actually using some of the spiffiest technological equipment of the times. I mean, we had access to computers!
I could actually submit a seismic processing job from a teletype terminal in Midland, Texas, and have it checked and submitted by a computer operator in The Woodlands outside of Houston the same day. I knew I had picked the right industry when, in the mid 1980's, the U.S. government decided they could help fund the big government labs by finding commercial applications for some of the technology. When Los Alamos in New Mexico went looking for industry customers, one of the first segments they turned to was "Big Oil". I found myself on a trip from Dallas Texas to Albuquerque New Mexico with a delegation of oil and gas technologists to get a first look at what the weapons guys had been doing inside of the top secret walls that housed the Manhattan project in it's day. We didn't get "inside the wall" where they do the real crazy stuff, and our unfortunately Iranian-born Vice President didn't even get that far, his clearance was denied at the gate and he spent the day in the hotel and looking at "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" in the museum. But the conversations we had around the conference table that day were pretty interesting.
"Oh so you want a way to reduce engine noise on a ship so you can listen better to sonic waves? ... yeah we can do that"
"Oh so you would like to be able to run huge 3D process simulation using parallel processing and hierarchical storage of modeling data? ... yeah we can do that"
And when the previously cloistered government scientists from the weapons lab met the oilfield completion engineers working on downhole perforation guns for deep drilling, it got really interesting:
"Oh it would be good if you could direct a shaped explosive charge to blow a precisely oriented hole through thick steel casing from a few miles away? Hell Son, we do that every god-damned day around here! Wanna come out to the range and see it?"
Later in the day I got to walk through what was then one of the largest computers on the planet, the Thinking Machines CM-2 massively parallel hypercube array, and when I say walk through, that's exactly what I mean. You didn't stand and look at this computer, you walked into it! I knew it was big when I saw them wheeling in a standard workstation like the ones we were using at the time to run our 3D visualizations, on a cart, and start to use it to run a backup of just part of the array.
They also had a Cray-2 there, the same model I ran into in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris when my wife and I visited for our 25th anniversary in 2006. I was later to find out it was not only the same model, but in fact the very same machine I had reverently laid my hand on to feel the chilled water cooling system when it was running simulated nuclear explosion models in New Mexico two decades earlier and an ocean away. Now where else but the oilfield could you make a connection like that?

Those Pesky Rare Earths

2011-01-03T16:04:00.001-08:00

So if the rare earth minerals are so rare, why all the fuss about them? Well actually, the rare earth minerals are named after the elements that they contain, which are primarily within the rare earth series on the periodic table, the lanthanides, elments 57-71, and numbers 21 and 39, Scandium and Yttrium. Despite the name, the elements are actually relatively plentiful in the earth's crust, but economically viable occurrences of the minerals are relatively rare compared to other mineable resources such as copper or iron ores. The real strategic value of the rare earth minerals is in the industrial uses of the elements they contain, which reads like a veritable Who's Who of the devices that allow us to continue as a high-tech society. Consider for example the following sampling of gadgets that depend on rare earth elements for their manufacture:

Aerospace components; mercury-vapor lamps; high-temperature superconductors; microwave filters; high refractive index glass; hydrogen storage; battery-electrodes; camera lenses; catalysts for oil refineries; chemical oxidizing agents; polishing powders; colorings in glass, ceramics and enamels; catalysts for self-cleaning ovens; rare-earth magnets; lasers; carbon arc lighting; glass used in welding goggles; ferrocerium firesteel (flint) products; ceramic capacitors; nuclear batteries; neutron capture materials; masers; phosphors; x-ray tubes; computer memories; fluorescent lamps; vanadium steel; portable X-ray machines; chemical reducing agents; PET Scan detectors.

Now you can understand why China's current 96% control of the export market for these minerals is of concern and why global mining companies are looking to open new sources.

What were those languages?

2010-11-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

Since posting my note about the languages used on the Western Australia bus system, TransPerth, I have had a lot of questions from people who didn't recognize several of them.
For those who are interested, here are some details on some of those that may not be familiar to our colleagues in the Western Hemisphere:
Amharic is a Semitic language spoken in North Central Ethiopia.
Dinka is a Nilotic language from Southern Sudan.
Karen is a group of tonal languages spoken by three million people in southern Burma, considered unusual among Tibeto-Burman dialects for not having any Chinese influence.
Kirundi is the Bantu language of 8.7 million Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi, Tanzania, Congo-Kinshasa and Uganda.
Dari is a variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan.

So what we have here is not only an indication of some of the important groups immigrating to Perth over the centuries, but also in some cases the languages spoken by groups, who when they leave their homeland, march to the nearest ocean, and set sail in a perpendicular course away from the shore, the next significant piece of land they encounter happens to be Western Australia.

When in Rome...

2010-11-15T22:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a handy tip for those of you working in a foreign country, or a different culture. If you want a quick overview of the demographics of the community you are working in, hop on the local public transport, whether it be bus, train, the tram at the international airport, or subway, and notice what languages are represented by the signage and announcements. Very telling.
In Houston, Texas, you are likely to see English, Spanish and Vietnamese. At the KLIA International Airport in Kuala Lumpur, announcements are made in Bahasa, English and Mandarin. On the Quebec subway signs are in French first and only grudgingly in smaller print in English, on the Tokyo train system, Japanese (and tellingly, ONLY Japanese!). The ferry from Helsinki, Finland to Tallinn, Estonia will print tickets in Finnish and Swedish, but not Estonian.

I recently gained some interesting insight into the Western Australia melting pot of cultures when I found myself gazing at the information placard on the TransPerth bus system. It was a veritable Rosetta Stone, with the same blurb repeated in:
English, Amharic, Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Dinka, Farsi, Karen, Swahili, French, Kirundi and Dari.

Lessons Learned

2010-11-06T20:13:00.000-07:00

Rare Earths are in the news (no not the disco band from the 70's, but the 17 elements and their alloys that are essential to many high tech applications), see: http://www.proactiveinvestors.com.au/companies/news/11256/china-rare-earths-are-not-a-bargaining-tool-11256.html, and since I am working in part for the mining industry these days, it took me back to my earliest encounters with these strange and wonderful outliers on the Periodic Table. In 1978 I was doing lab work in the Michigan State University geology department with Dr. Thomas Vogel, who was investigating immiscible magmas from Mt. Desert Island in Maine (the work was published in 1980: http://www.jstor.org/pss/30062379). My job was to grind up core plugs from opposite sides of flow boundaries in the samples and take them over to the nuclear reactor in the basement of the old Engineering building for neutron activation. Got to wear a dosimeter badge and then bring back the “hot” samples in the back of Vogel's Volvo station wagon surrounded by lead bricks. I've often wondered since how much stray radiation that vehicle picked up and what would have happened if he tried to drive it across the Canadian border with today's detection technology! Anyway we did neutron activation analysis using a pulse height analyzer attached through a teletype interface to the University CDC 6500 mainframe to store and analyze the data (high tech stuff at the time). I did the linear regression analysis to calibrate against standard samples on a programmable TI calculator that stored the programs on a magnetic card. And it was notable for me because it marked one of two key learnings for me early in my scientific career.
I remember distinctly we were plotting the relative abundances of the REE's based on the pulse heights from the multi-channel pulse height analyzer. I was fitting a best fit linear regression to the data, and Dr. Vogel wanted all the plots to go through the origin, because theoretically, with none of the element present, there should be no reading. Being the one doing the lab work, I knew from experience that there would always be some cross-contamination of samples, so I insisted that the plots should be a best fit to the real data and not include the origin as a valid data point. After a few discussions over beers at the Peanut Barrel, Dr. Vogel agreed, and the lab and data analysis procedures developed by a third-year undergraduate student went into the paper published by two PhD's and a Master's candidate. Lesson learned: never forget it's all about the rocks.

My willingness to argue the point was informed by an experience the summer before as a student geologist in Exuma Sound on the research vessel R/V Gillis out of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Miami (http://search.datapages.com/data/doi/10.1306/212F7B99-2B24-11D7-8648000102C1865D). We were mapping turbidites off the Bahamas using deep water piston coring and I was part of the deck crew. As one of the core barrels went over the side, I noticed that it did not look the same as the others, as if the weight drop had already been triggered or not set correctly, but I didn't say anything because I was just a student watching from the deck. Four hours later the barrel was retrieved with no sample and considerable waste of the ship's time.
Lesson learned: sometimes the junior members of the team are the ones who see things that the experienced hands have gotten complacent about. That's why a co-pilot can abort a takeoff and any member of an offshore rig crew can shut down the operation without retribution if they feel a procedure is unsafe.

From the SPE Intelligent Energy Conference

2010-03-30T03:07:00.000-07:00

Some highlights from Tuesday's technical sessions in Utrecht Netharlands last week:

- Shell and CapGemini talked about USD$5B in value from fields "born smart" or intelligent from the design phase, mostly from instrumented well bores, but also mentioned predictive maintenance as a goal
- Chevron gave a very generic presentation on transformational change around prioritizing their 200-some intelligent field projects
- Saudi Aramco defined their I-Field as mostly real-time drilling operations, with a goal to reduce the number of wireline operations (bet SLB and HAL loved to hear that!) to reduce costs
- BP had one of the more interesting and relevant talks, indicating their instrumentation now at over 2M tags on over 700 wells including 80% of their top 100 producers, and using real time monitoring to add 50K BOE / day in production. Preventative maintenance scheduling is in planning for their downhole flow meters in Azerbaijan. They are letting their producing asset customers drive the projects rather than pushing the technology, with goals of shifting support roles from offshore to onshore and reducing personnel on board
- Statoil's presentation on Integrated Operations specifically mentioned multi-field control centers for monitoring rotating equipment, but it was still in reactive mode
- PIPC closed out with a very high level presentation on best practices for automated oilfields

- Got a good look at PointCross's dashboard and workflow user interface, they are more concerned with the data management behind the scenes

Into the Fray (s) ...

2010-01-31T09:13:00.000-08:00

Once again, it seems the oil industry has missed an opportunity to be proactive and provide the public with critical information that could help citizens impacted by oil drilling make intelligent and informed decisions. I speak of course of the Marcellus Shale play, where there is an ongoing debate over the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing (identifying it by its full technical name avoids all those style questions about "frac' -ing" or "fracking" - see http://blogs.chron.com/newswatchenergy/archives/2010/01/post_12.html).
We all know that our industry has access to plenty of technology tools for the timely distribution of information about leasing, drilling, and completions. So why are we not sharing this information as far as necessary or possible with the public? In Pennsylvania and West Virginia, we have the opportunity to develop a fresh relationship with communities not already numbingly familiar with the oil and gas business like in parts of the South and West. Yet it takes a bunch of social activists from MIT to decide that information about oil and gas leasing should be made available to communities through Google Earth?
See: http://civic.mit.edu/projects/c4fcm/extract
C'mon guys...

BRIC becomes BICSA for Climate Change?

2009-12-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

Given the recent attention to the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) after their June Summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia, it was interesting to open the New York Times this morning and see not Dmitry Medvedev or his designee seated at the table with Barack Obama, the Chinese Premier, the Indian Prime Minister and the Brazilian President at the close of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, but the President of South Africa. Perhaps the choice was more of a preference for a growinge economy with a vested interest in biomass and energy and an easier negotiating partner than just the heft of population and GDP?

Monthly Reading in World Oil

2009-09-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

A few fun tidbits from the August 2009 issue of "World Oil" from Gulf Publishing...

1) On page 7 in Perry Fischer's Editorial, a new way to define your position on the political spectrum by testing your belief in Global Warming vs. Professional Wrestling. I guess you might be a Dittohead if you think The Undertaker has more professional credibility than Al Gore.

2) On page 11 a news item about a Morgan Stanley trader who "built up a hefty unauthorized oil futures position after drinking at lunchtime, before hiding the deals overnight". Makes me wonder if he would have stayed under the radar if he had reversed the process and done his dealing at night and hiding during lunch. And okay, who here hasn't "built up a hefty ... GAS futures position" after eating at a Tex-Mex restaurant?

3) And finally a nod to those of us explaining to school age kids why they should pay attention in Math class - on page 17 in an excellent discussion on the potential of shale plays, Arthur Berman casually mixes up averages, modes, and correlations. It pays to think for a moment why there is a 3.5 year difference between the average and the mode of horizontal well producing lifetimes. This tells you a lot about the distribution of values without ever seeing a chart if you remember your basic math. Just like it tells you a lot about the real estate business that they insist on using median home values instead of averages, and refer to home prices "from the 200's".

Enjoy and stay skeptical...

Word Cloud

2009-07-30T05:27:00.000-07:00

Some interesting technology that got publicity during President Obama's inauguration speech:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

Here is a Word Cloud from this blog:

It was created and is posted at:
http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/1022920/Energy_Industry_Blog

Nitrogen in Gasoline?

2009-07-07T16:47:00.001-07:00

Anyone else wondering why Shell is advertising an inert element as an "enhancement" to their automotive fuel? Last I heard Nitrogen and other inert elements actually lowered the BTU rating of hydrocarbons at the wellhead, why would we want to put them back in? Perhaps a hint here:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article5927869.ece
A coincidence that this marketing push comes at a time when Shell is suffering market loss due to their abandonment of alternate energy strategies? And what about the parallels of all the oil companies suddenely using geeky scientists to push their agendas? Remember during the Bush years when scientists weren't very cool? Well maybe our new administration has at least moved toward bringing respectability to to technical professionals who work in the energy industry... that would be a welcome, if unintended, change...

Waiting on Technology?

2009-05-25T20:26:00.000-07:00

An article in the New York Times in April (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/us/politics/11climate.html?_r=1) should remind all of us who are positioning ourselves to apply technology to the new CO2 sequestration segment of the industry that we are on the right track. In the article, Jonathan Pershing, U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, who was at the time leading a U.S. delegation to an international climate change conference in Germany, defended the American "lack of robust leadership" by explaining that the Obama administration was "waiting to measure the American technological ... capacity" and expecting Congress to set specific targets. Many of us expect either a carbon tax credit or cap and trade schemen in the next 6 months to drive the financial business case for applying what have traditionally been hydrocarbon extraction technologies from the oil and gas industry to new CO2 sequestration projects. Pershing has been at this post only since mid-March but brings, interestingly, a geology and geophysics degree to the position from the University of Minnesota. And he seems to know the oil business. In 2004, he gave a presentation at an "ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT AND ECONOMICS" conference of the IEEE, in which he showed the possibility of up to 4% reduction in shareholder value of various oil companies due to restricted access in sensitive areas, either closer to human populations, remote, or in terrestrial or marine ecoregions. It highlighted many companies that are now actively involved in "green" initiatives such as CO2 sequestration.

Sea Ice

2009-05-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

It seems some research soon to be published by Ken Golden at University of Utah and Hajo Eicken at the University of Alaska shows that permeability in sea ice is anisotropic and both temperature and salinity dependent. I am wondering if this means that someday we may be analyzing 4D seismic data to understand the properties of gas hydrates?

The Carbon Lifecycle

2009-05-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

Just off of Interstate 45 on the Freestone-Leon County Line, there is a place where you can see the entire anthropogenic carbon cycle in a single vista. Pull off at exit 180 and take the service road on the west side of the highway north about 5 miles. You will pass turn-ins for producing oil fields operated by operated by XTO, Pinnacle, and Anadarko. At the top of a rise just before the power lines cross the highway, you can pull into entrance 52 of Texas Westmoreland Coal Co.’s Jewett Mine, though not into the mine itself (mind the No Trespassing signs!) Walk to the fence and look down into the creekbed to your left and you can see slowly decomposing mats of leaf litter and other organic material in a slow-running stream, that left to their own devices, in many millenia, could be the source rock for a future gneration's hydrocarbon resource. Then look up and across the fence to the 35,000 acre lignite dragline operation that is continuously and voraciously scooping up the results of that process from the Eocene, and out to the horizon where the Limestone Electric Generating Station burns that stored energy to generate electricity and returns much of the carbon to the atmosphere as CO2. listen to the hum of the electricity in the high-tension wires over your head as the result of that energy process flows out to the cities and towns of southeast Texas, much of it to power equipment in the pumping oil wells that you passed just down the road. Now allow yourself to think about how much organic content is burned up every hour and how long it will take to renew, and you start to get a feel for the geologic time scale and how quickly we are altering it... I recommend that every Texas school child whose education is financed by oil and gas revenues have the opportunity to see first hand this cycle at work ...

What, me Worry?

2009-05-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

At the PNEC Data Management conference here in Houston this week, the organizers left out at everyone's seat on the first day a copy of the Digital Energy Journal highlighting a quote from Bob Bloom of National Oilwell Varco, saying "I don't worry about the 'great crew change'". I wondered why he wasn't worried so I did a little research and found that while he was headed off to this Drilling Conference in Amsterdam, rumors were swirling about layoffs of more than 100 people at Varco's production facility in Texas. So of course Bob wasn't personally worried. He was, in the words of one attendee commenting on similar recent layoffs at Schlumberger, "paving the way for his next job" by forcing cuts of experienced workers close to being vested in their pension plans. So as noted by one of the speakers at the conference, don't worry about the great crew change, it will come and find you... and it won't be so great!

Political Amoebas

2009-03-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else find it humorous that the latest stunning evidence for evolution, a giant colony of clonal amoebas (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090311131608.htm), chose to take up residence in a cow pasture in Texas, the state that can't seem to decide if it agrees with Charles Darwin yet? So now things are evolving from the microscopic all the way to microprocessors. Just a few weeks ago, I attended a High Performance Computing workshop at Rice University. There I learned that engineers working on the new Petaflop machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory are having to shield the dense cluster of chips from cosmic radiation that could impact its calculations (http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-039-s-Chips-to-Save-Mankind-From-the-Cosmic-Rays-Threat-83000.shtml). Wait a minute! Small incremental mutations to an encoding scheme, caused by random cosmic radiation, leading to changes in behaviour? Hey, that supercomputer is trying to evolve! Leave it alone and let's see if it learns to make an amoeba...

fixing your laptop...

2009-03-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

My laptop plasma screen has developed a split personality. At first I thought maybe it was the fact that I recently had to switch to my backup pair of reading glasses due to an unfortunate act of gravity at the Rockets Game on Wednesday (don’t ask). But then I looked at some small font hardcopy as a control, and had other family members who do not wear glasses take a look, and yes, the image on my screen now has a doppelganger, a conjoined twin, a co-located nearby companion. The oxymoronically named IT Help Desk told me to make sure that my computer was out of range of any magnetic fields. I pointed out that would require moving outside the heliopause, a trip that took Voyager over 20 years, and I really needed the problem fixed sooner than that…

Predicting Flu Season...

2009-03-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

Did you know that last year the people who track search trends at Google were able to predict the onset of flu season two weeks earlier than the Centers for Disease Control? This is because people started searching for health related information about flu symptoms online even before they started to make appointments with their doctors or miss work. This same kind of trending analysis is being looked at by large companies with internal search engines to try to determine other types of trends.

Inside the Mind of a Scientist

2009-03-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

It's hard to explain to someone not of a particularly scientific bent how an analytical mind works, but I found myself trying to explain the other day to my wife, who is definitely more artistic...

What if, I explained, when you looked at your iron supplement pills in the morning, the first thing that went through your head was "I wonder if they contain ferrous sulfate because if they contained ferrous oxide they would just turn to rust?"...

Or if when you heard an interview with Ron Wood in which he said that any two of the Rolling Stones could have formed a band equally as good you immediately think "ok, so how many potential bands is that? Let's see, 4 factorial, but no because Jagger and Richards is the same band as Richards and Jagger", but then you hear the rest of the interview and he says only if he was one of them, so that removes the last factor, and then when you pose the question to your 15-year old son he wants to know how many of them are dead before he answers, and you think "good point".... anyway it's about 5 days before you really think about what a band composed of only Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts would actually sound like ...

Or you almost step on a stinkbug on the sidewalk and the first thing you think is, "What possible evolutionary advantage could there be to be shaped like an irregular polygon?"...

Now, who wants to be inside MY head?

Best Opening Line from a Staff Meeting

2009-02-10T07:04:00.000-08:00

"My copy of the meeting agenda lost some characters when it was reformatted from html, so it is difficult for me to determine if I have been invited to provide HISTORICAL perspective on the project, or HYSTERICAL perspective, but I imagine by now it is already apparent..."

Watching Basketballs...

2009-02-03T12:54:00.000-08:00

I do remember when I first got interested in Physics ... It would have been in 1971, and yes that would make me at best 13. I had been reading "The Glass Giant of Palomar", the story of the construction of the 200 inch Hale telescope in California, and I was fascinated by the accounts of the precision required to mold the giant mirror, and why even a small perturbation in the surface could deflect light away from the focus...
That of course led to an interest in astronomy, which was not unusual in those heady days of space travel coming true. People were still landing on the Moon in 1971 and we saw no reason why they should ever stop the expansion of that trend.

My brothers and I used to take a bus to go downtown to the Milwaukee Bucks games, and we always got there in time to watch warmup and practice.
I was sitting in the stands one night watching the entire team taking jump shot practice at one end of the court. All the basketballs were arriving at the hoop at the same time, and as they bounced off of each other around and off the rim, careening off the backboard and each other and shooting back out to various corners of the court, I suddenly realized that what I was seeing was not as random a process as it would first appear.

Every one of those collisions between basketballs, iron rim, or plexiglass backboard could be precisely and elegantly described by the same laws of physics that governed the trajectory of the flights to the moon that had so enthralled us in that same decade. Here was a live example of ballistics, conservation of momentum, and elastic collisions, and the same laws that governed how those balls swooped down to collide in the cylinder above the rim ensured that the planets in our solar system did not do exactly the same thing.

I was impressed .... and hooked ...

This I believe

2009-01-14T10:46:00.000-08:00

I believe in the power of technology to take what was once considered unattainable, and make it commonplace. My mother grew up in a community where you had to go next door to use the one available telephone, and now I personally carry no less than 5 telecommunication devices everywhere I go. But I also believe that with this comes the responsibility for adapting our lives so that we remain the owners of technology, and not slaves to it. I work in the oil and gas exploration industry, a business intensely driven by technology. Partly because of the advances that I have helped to engineer, there exists today the ability to deliver energy from and to places that once would have been considered impossible. From the deepest depths of the oceans to the most inhospitable climates on the planet, I have done my part to assist the world’s people in consuming energy at 5000 times the rate that it can potentially be preserved by biological and geological processes.

Those who know me, my environmental bent, and my appreciation for nature, often ask me how I reconcile my occupation with my conscience. My mastery of technology has led to conveniences and advances that would have been unthinkable to my parents, and I know it will continue to lead my children to fulfill dreams that in my younger days lived only in the pages of science fiction magazines. What I try to remember is that just because I CAN do these things, this does not necessarily mean I SHOULD. The object lessons of the darker side of energy use lie buried in a thin layer of easily identifiable dust in the sediments under Hiroshima Japan, and stare at me every day from newspaper headlines about ozone holes and global warming.

But I believe what physicist Richard Feynman left on his last blackboard at Cal Tech before he died in February of 1989. “What I cannot create, I do not understand”. What I attempt to heed is the corollary – “What I do create, I must understand.” The same technology that I apply every day to help generate energy can and must be used to communicate how that energy can be used wisely, efficiently and responsibly. So I make a point to take the same technology that allows me to gather and accumulate the knowledge I use every day in my job, and use it to disseminate messages like this one, as widely as the energy that I help to course around our globe. In this way, I remain the master of my technology, not its slave. This I Believe.

The Great Crew Change

2009-01-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of chatter recently in the oil and gas industry about what is termed "The Great Crew Change". For those of you not in the industry, a crew change on an offshore oil rig means that the guys who have been working out there for the last few weeks or months, and know every intimate detail of the operation and equipment, pack up and head for shore, while a fresh team arrives on board and invariably spends the first few days familiarizing themselves with the peculiarities and quirks of the unique local processes, probably re-inventing solutions that left with the previous crew.

The "Great Crew Change" is used to describe the fact that because of the cyclical nature of this industry, most of the senior technicians and managers in the industry today were hired during the "boom" of the late 1970's to mid 1980's (remember the bumper sticker from West Texas in 1986 - "Please God just give me one more oil boom, and I promise this time I won't piss it away"?. That means they are now in their 50's and getting ready to retire, and with them goes a quarter century worth of experience and knowledge. According to a study in late 2006 by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., about 56 percent of workers in the oil and gas industry are between 35 and 54 years old. With 55 as the average industry retirement age (although with the 2008 crash in the values of 401 retirement accounts, the joke is that "90 is the new 50"), more than half the oil and natural gas employee base will leave over the next decade. This will be only slightly offset by the fact that a lot of technical professionals will be retained as consultants after they retire.

But here is a more personal and visual way to understand what the industry will be losing - yesterday at 5:05 PM I walked around my company's office at Dairy Ashford in Houston, sent one text message, and by 5:15 I had over 100 years oil and gas experience gathered around the bar at Big John's Ice House, without even breaking a sweat. It is going to be very hard for the Engineering grad student that we recruited last year to do that...