Exprodat’s Managing Director Gareth Smith will be presenting a paper entitled “The Role of Spatial Integration in Play Analysis” at the EAGE’s Barcelona ’10 Conference, on 16th June 2010, examining how GIS can be used within oil exploration as an analysis tool.
The following information is taken from the paper’s abstract:
“Many companies only use GIS as a simple data integration and visualisation tool, and don‟t exploit its full spatial analysis capabilities. Once data has been collected in a GIS, it is often exported for further analysis in Excel, where the rich spatial trends and relationships inherent in the data are lost. However the spatial analysis functionality that lies at the core of GIS can be used to support the interpretation of large volumes of data and develop quantitative play analysis models. It enables you to develop play risk models review and rank acreage based on large volumes of GIS-based data in an objective, consistent, iterative way.
GIS is emerging as a key component for supporting and improving the exploration process, including risk assessment and opportunity screening and ranking. The key benefits of this approach are:
- GIS provides the ideal platform for data integration in the exploration analysis process. Using all the data available, in a consistent fashion, improves our confidence levels in assessing risk and uncertainty.
- GIS can significantly reduce the cycle times for an exploration project, especially for manually intensive processes such as data integration, analysis and risk map generation. This time can be used to iterate and refine the models used for ranking opportunities, or to reduce overall project times.
- GIS provides a framework for developing consistent exploration processes across all assets within a company. This leads to a more consistent, auditable corporate prospect portfolio, and better portfolio management decisions.
The overall result of reducing technical uncertainty, standardising process and understanding risk is improved decision making and better exploration efficiency. Better prospects will be drilled earlier in a programme, and an improved framework for integrating the results of new wells back in to the regional play risk models will be established.”
To find out more please come to Room 123 at the EAGE conference on 16th June, at 9:30 am. For more information on the conference please see the EAGE’s Barcelona ’10 website.
