1887
Volume 22, Issue 3
  • ISSN: 0263-5046
  • E-ISSN: 1365-2397

Abstract

The low key announcement in January that Petroleum Geo-Service (PGS) had divested its subsidiary PGS Tigress via a management buy-out ends the company’s 10-year proprietorial association with possibly the most ambitious geoscience and engineering integration software development ever launched. Andrew McBarnet takes up the story. The thing that amazes David Sullivan most is that the Tigress project was ever launched in the first place. ‘It is extraordinary that the software ever got written because it set out to create a database from scratch covering everything from geophysics to reservoir simulation. As such it was way ahead of its time.’ Sullivan is chairman of Tigress Geosciences, the management buy-out from PGS based in Marlow, UK now managing the continued evolution of The Integrated Geoscience and Reservoir Engineering Software System (Tigress), best described as a suite of reservoir interpretation software tightly integrated around an Oracle database. For PGS the disposal was, according to Diz Mackeown, president of PGS Marine Geophysical, part of the company’s policy to concentrate on core activities. He noted that ‘the deal allows a successful relationship for both companies by way of an ongoing corporate licence agreement for the complete Tigress software portfolio.’ Prior to the buy out, the Tigress operation had had been organised into an independent division but the actual transaction was delayed by the financial restructuring of PGS following the collapse of merger talks with Veritas DGC. Sullivan claims that Tigress Geosciences represents ‘the industry’s only independent software producer with a totally independent product covering interpretation tools from geophysics to reservoir simulation. The description, so relevant to current calls for integrated E&P software products, belies the fact that the Tigress concept dates back to 1988, and has been a reality since the early 1990s. It was then that David Wilson, former academic at Imperial College and later a reservoir engineer with Shell, coaxed the first substantial funding out of the UK Department of Energy’s Offshore Supplies Office and company sponsors, Shell, Enterprise Oil and ARCO British for work on Tigress, initially at Robertson Research in North Wales and then at Energy Resource Consultants (ERC) in Marlow, near London. In 1991 First Break recorded that after three years work Robertson ERC (as it was then) was ready to launch Tigress. The report said that 50 software engineers were involved in the project development work being carried out by Robertson ERC with Winfrith Petroleum Technology (a spin-off from the UK Atomic Energy Agency which focused on the reservoir simulation end of the spectrum, led by Dr Joe King). Then as today, Tigress was ‘designed to forecast and plan the optimum development of a reservoir from early appraisal through to maturity.’ With a background in the software industry, Sullivan joined Robertson ERC to manage the installation and rollout of Tigress. The very first installation was for Shell in Rijswijk, The Netherlands. He recalls ‘the system was, and arguably still is, the most tightly integrated E&P system available. The concept of the asset team and the need to minimise development lead times by taking an integrated approach is commonplace today. But in 1991 these were radical ideas indeed.’ Sullivan admits that the Tigress team in the short term might have been better advised to have limited the scope of its aspirations when it first started. ‘In those days companies like Landmark and Schlumberger were focused on workstations and the functionality of individual products in individual disciplines, and clearly that met the needs of the market. Tigress, on the other hand, was a major new technical project and it was also asking industry specialists to work in a different way. That was a tall order.’

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2004-03-01
2024-03-29
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  • Article Type: Research Article
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