Trends in visualization for E&P operations

Duane Dopkin and Huw James of Paradigm provide a user-friendly guide to the uses of visualization in the E&P business today and what we can expect in the future. Visualization of digital data has significantly enriched the arts and sciences and their industry sector derivatives (e.g., entertainment, government, architecture, engineering, medical, and oil and gas) by helping to communicate complex geometries, spatial models, simulations, and even ideas through sensory technology and processes. The complexity of these representations that we attempt to communicate through visualization can often be attributed to their size and scale, their diversity and heterogeneity, their dynamic nature, and data sampling barriers that prevent direct image or model recovery. Visualization has not only come to play a strong supporting role in understanding complex geometries and spatial data relationships, but it also can synergistically influence and subsequently improve the prerequisite data sampling, transformation, and modelling methods used to generate the visual representation. Assimilation of subsurface data and the construction of subsurface geologic models critical to hydrocarbon exploration and production carry all of these complexities. Therefore, it is not surprising that visualization of digital data has impacted the work processes of geoscientists and engineers who must work with a large diversity and large volume of subsurface signals and signatures and associate them with rock and fluid properties. Visualization of digital subsurface data can be traced back to the early 1980s with the introduction of interpretation workstations. Both the science and application were significantly enhanced in the early 1990s with the introduction of 3D voxel-based visualization and interpretation technology, providing subsurface insights through co-visualizations and opacity rendering. Advances in computer graphics, highperformance computing, and application functionality continued enabling a broader range of subsurface visualization investigative tasks. The intersection of these advances with higher levels of data access and application integration stimulated the creation and proliferation of large visualization centres for multi-disciplinary collaborative decision making. Visualization centres are largely used for prospect review sessions, collaborative team and executive management problem resolution, joint venture presentations, and final collaborative decision-making. Today, asset management teams are working in a hub-and-spoke environment where the Visionarium is the hub of decision-making, team rooms are used for collaborative efforts of four to six team members, and preliminary work is conducted at the desktop. In team rooms, small groups are able to gain a better appreciation and understanding of each other’s discipline, selecting geologic targets with a higher propensity for economic success, and developing safer well plans with less environmental impact. With performance and economic advances in computer graphics cards, microprocessors, and next generation ‘embedded’ visualization applications, visualization has pushed to the desktop enabling geoscientists and engineers to generate a more comprehensive ‘picture story’ from field data to geologic model to drilling completion; while capturing and understanding the transformation of subsurface field signals to rock and fluid properties. This trend is indeed timely as the search for quality prospects and demand for increased production has migrated to more challenging environments. Geoscientists and engineers are tasked with qualifying subsalt reflections, unravelling the position of anisotropic over-thrusts, interpreting the signatures of fractured reservoirs, resolving stratigraphic detail and recovering reflectivities for reservoir property prediction, and qualifying differences between time-lapsed surveys. To carry out these demands, they require continuous visualization connection between geophysics, petrophysics, interpretation, and drilling engineering solutions rather than a decoupled post-visualization solution. To meet these challenges, the latest hardware and software advances have come together to support visualizations that incorporate prospect and regional scale; seismic and reservoir scale; static and dynamic models; exploration and production (limited) data; and transformations with interpretation for improved rock and fluid property interpretation.