Reassessing the shared earth model makes sense

David Hardy, business development manager at Roxar Software Solutions, which specialises in products and solutions to optimize production and maximize recovery from oil and gas reservoirs, spells out why petroleum geologists and all the other disciplines have to collaborate on a genuinely shared earth model. Anyone who has worked in the oil industry for a few years will know what integration isn’t. Not that long ago oil companies were arranged along functional lines with each discipline consigned to a particular box. Geophysicist, geologists and engineers existed in virtual isolation. Huge barriers existed between the disciplines and there was little opportunity for knowledge sharing across disciplines even when working on the same project. Added to this, there is a new challenge. With rationalisation and reorganisation, asset teams are now expected to do the same work but with an ever decreasing team. Team members are now expected to take on wider roles. The requirement to work closely together and make decisions based on models that incorporate data from all the disciplines now appears obvious. It did, however, take the industry many years to reorganise based on the asset team. Even today not all disciplines or assets teams have broken down the barriers. With the need greater than ever and the availability of the correct tools, it appears that there is a resurgence in interest for a truly shared earth model. The un-shared earth model With historically poor communication between disciplines it is not surprising that applications developed in isolation and were poorly integrated. Software merely replicated the practices and workflows of the industry. Even within single disciplines, software was poorly integrated with staff required to learn different software packages for each step of their project workflow. The same data were often entered multiple times into different packages and in the worst cases there may have been different vintages of the same data used by the geoscientist versus the engineer. A lot of time was also wasted formatting and transferring data.