Exploring the Ten Habits: Ensuring Interpretations Are Reasonable and Valid

Bob Shoup's blog entry from earlier this year, "The Ten Habits of Highly Successful Oil Finders" sparked a lot of interest and discussion. As promised, we are now delving further into each habit, and want to invite your participation.  Read on to find out more...

Habit #1: Successful oil finders ensure that their interpretations are geologically and geometrically valid in three dimensions. Here is an investigation as to why.

At SCA, we see many prospect maps that are geologically unreasonable and often geometrically impossible. These unreasonable and impossible maps have cost our industry billions of dollars in unnecessary dry holes. These dry holes are all the more tragic when you consider the fact that all of the wells drilled on the basis of these unreasonable maps could have been avoided with the use of proper techniques. 

Figure 1

For example, one of the most common mistakes we see is the result of interpreters connecting two or more faults as one.  (Figure 1)

Figure 2

Often the two faults that are connected have throws in different directions, which we call 'screw faults'. With the exception of strike-slip faults, screw faults are a geometrically impossible interpretation. Yet we see them on many maps. They are so common that a screw fault interpretation can be seen in the user manual of one of our industry's leading 3D interpretation packages.

Any prospect that relies on a closure against a screw fault is a dry hole waiting to happen. One way to mitigate this risk is through utilization of Quick Look Techniques as developed and taught by SCA's leadership and training faculty, and also available as a printed textbook.  A classic Quick Look Technique to avoid drilling wells on prospects that rely on screw faults is to plot the vertical separation along the trapping fault (Figure 2). 

Figure 3

This technique takes less than an hour and can result in you saving your company the cost of a dry hole  (Figure 3). Overall, a pretty good investment of time.

So, now we would like to hear from you. Do you know of any dry holes that were drilled on geometrically impossible interpretations? We encourage you to share your examples (redacted as necessary to prevent release of proprietary information), so that others may benefit from your experience. If the example you send is selected for inclusion in an upcoming SCA Quick Look Techniques class, you can attend that class (or any other scheduled QLT class) at no charge.

The Resume as Glorified Business Card: Tips to Upstream Professionals on Landing an Interview

At SCA, we not only provide consulting and training services to the upstream oil and gas industry, we also assist in screening and recruiting direct hire candidates. Recruiter Mark Connor has put together some tips for prospective candidates on landing an interview with your employer of choice.  In this first installment of a two-part series, he describes the essence of an effective resume and the different audiences with whom you must be prepared to communicate. This article and more can be found in the latest GeoLOGIC Newsletter, now available for download here. 

SCA's Mark Connor

Drilling Engineers have a tendency to get straight to the point, and it was a Drilling Engineer who summarized the essence of a resume to me in four words – “A Glorified Business Card”. A business card is a few square inches of space in which a professional is required to sum themselves up as concisely as possible, so what information makes it on there? Your name, job title, company and contact details. Nothing else makes the cut. A resume is intended to relate the same core information, albeit in a little more detail - but where a business card is an effective tool to use when making a new business contact, what is the real purpose of a resume?

One vital misconception regarding the role of a resume is that a resume will get you a job. In reality, your goal when writing a resume should be to get an INTERVIEW. Your success in a job search will hinge on your interview and a well written resume will get you that interview. With that in mind, resumes should contain enough information to catch attention and get you in front of a decision maker.

A second misconception regarding the resume is that it WILL be evaluated by the hiring manager. In reality, the resume will more than likely be assessed by at least three other people before it reaches the decision maker, and those other people are unlikely to be from a technical background. Consider the following scenarios.

•        You are acquainted with the hiring manager and you send your resume directly to that person. In this case, the likelihood is that the manager will already be aware your abilities and the resume acts merely as a formality.

•         You deal with a specialized Recruiting/Consulting firm. These companies deal with Hiring Managers day in, day out and they have a deep understanding of the technical areas they deal with. A Professional Recruiter may not be from a technical background, but they are able to look past “key words” and understand the nuances of your technical abilities and how they relate to their client’s needs. A recommendation from a specialist Recruiter can be extremely effective in gaining an interview.

•          You deal with a generalist staffing company that has international clientele but no true specialization. These companies often have access to every vacancy that their client has open, so they work on many unrelated job openings every day. The key word search becomes a factor in resume selection and an understanding of technical suitability becomes limited.

•          You “apply online”. Regularly described as “black holes”, web portals do an excellent job of tracking applications but it is extremely difficult to influence the selection process.

So, considering the above scenarios, how should you approach resume preparation? It needs to appeal to different audiences. A resume should contain easily identifiable key words and a sufficiently simplistic breakdown of your job role to be understood by a Recruiter. However, it also needs to be detailed enough to inform a Hiring Manager that you are capable of performing the duties required. It requires a delicate balance but in order to be successful in a job search, your resume will need to convince more than just the Hiring Manager that you are the right person to call in for an interview.

SCA Training Instructor John W. Snedden, Ph.D., featured in the AAPG Explorer

Subsurface Consultants & Associates, LLC, (SCA) is pleased to announce that John W. Snedden, Ph.D., project leader of the Gulf of Mexico Basin Depositional Synthesis Project conducted by the Institute for Geophysics at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin (UTIG), has recently joined SCA’s training faculty.  Dr. Snedden’s first scheduled course for SCA, “Depositional Evolution of the Gulf of Mexico Sedimentary Basin”, will take place at SCA’s Houston training facility August 6-7, 2012.

Dr. Snedden has over 25 years of industry experience with Mobil and ExxonMobil, and his specialties include sequence and seismic stratigraphy, sedimentology, reservoir characterization, reservoir connectivity analysis, and unconventional resource evaluation.  Observations drawn from his experience working on the GBDS project are featured in the May 2012 edition of the AAPG Explorer.  

The Ten Habits of Highly Successful Oil Finders

SCA's CEO Dan Tearpock is fond of saying that it is highly trained people, not workstations, who find oil and gas. But what specific knowledge and habits do those successful oil finders possess?  Bob Shoup, who recently joined SCA's Consulting Division, has put together a list of the Ten Habits of Highly Successful Oil Finders.  We'll be going into more in-depth discussions of the "Habits" over the next few months, but in the meantime, here is the full list to start your wheels turning. After you have a look, please return to the following questions:

If you had to choose one as being more important, which would it be and why?

Can you recall a real life situation where any of these habits informed a business-critical decision?

The Ten Habits of Highly Successful Oil Finders 

Successful Oil Finders: 

1. Ensure that their interpretations are geologically and geometrically valid in three dimensions. 

2. Have a strong background in geology, and a thorough knowledge of the tectonic setting and depositional environments for the area in which they are working. 

3. Plan their time and work in order to ensure accurate interpretations and maps. 

4. Use all of the data to ensure that they have a reasonable and accurate subsurface interpretation. 

5. Ensure that their seismic and well correlations are accurate and loop-tied. 

6. Know which methods, tools, and techniques are needed to define and understand the subsurface.

7. Map all relevant geological surfaces. 

8. Map multiple horizons to develop reasonably correct, three-dimensional interpretations.

9. Document their work. 

10. Seek out mentors and experienced individuals with knowledge and expertise; and serve as mentors to those seeking experience. 

SCA Welcomes Bob Shoup

(From left to right) Dan Tearpock & Bob Shoup
in Thailand, 2009

Subsurface Consultants & Associates, LLC (SCA) welcomes Robert “Bob” Shoup to its consulting division, in addition to his existing role as a member of SCA's training faculty. Bob is a Board Certified Petroleum Geologist with over 30 years experience in basin analysis, regional studies, new play generation, prospect evaluation, field studies and development planning, drilling operations, and project management.

  
Bob and SCA’s CEO Dan Tearpock, longtime friends and colleagues, plan to leverage their combined expertise and Bob’s extensive network in Southeast Asia to grow SCA’s presence in that region.

Bob began his career at Shell Oil in 1980, followed by four years working for private oil companies before becoming an independent consultant in 2003; consulting in Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Bob is a proven oil finder with a 46% exploration success rate and over 100 MMBOE discovered resources.

Bob is a recognized expert in clastic depositional environments, rift basins, and syndepositional structural systems. He has served in leadership capacities and on numerous committees with the AAPG and is a past president of the Division of Professional Affairs, organizations from which he has also received multiple awards and professional distinctions. Not only does he excel in the oil and gas industry, he is also a recognized author: in 1994 Bob was a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in drama for his play, Second Alarm.

In March, Bob presented SCA’s first ever “Applied Problems in Interpreting Clastic Depositional Systems” course to much success at SCA's Houston, TX training facility. The course is scheduled to be repeated in Perth, Australia this coming December 10-14, and is available to bring in-house on demand. Bob is also slated to teach upcoming sessions of one of SCA’s most popular courses: Applied Subsurface Geological Mapping. See SCA's 2012 Training Calendar for more details. 

Dan Tearpock honored with DPA Heritage Award

Daniel J. Tearpock, Chairman/CEO of Subsurface Consultants & Associates, LLC (SCA), was recently honored by the AAPG Division of Professional Affairs as the latest recipient of the Heritage Award.  The announcement was made at an awards luncheon on February 29, 2012 at Del Frisco’s Restaurant in Houston, Texas.  The DPA Heritage Award honors an individual in the oil and gas industry who is generally known for substantial industry contributions, including significant discoveries, business accomplishments, and/or work in academia and publishing. Award recipients are selected based on having built a reputation for success in the industry, and having taken a proactive role in passing on their knowledge and experiences to the next generation.

The Heritage Award was first given to Michael T. Halbouty (deceased) in 2004. Other past recipients include such industry luminaries as Robert D. Gunn (2005), William L. Fisher (2006), M. Ray Thomasson (2008), and John J. Amoruso (2009). This year’s award was based in large part on the achievements of the company founded by Mr. Tearpock in 1988, Subsurface Consultants & Associates, LLC (SCA). SCA’s record of industry success includes consulting assignments with over 350 companies across the world resulting in the discovery and/or development of over six billion barrels of oil equivalent. SCA has also trained tens of thousands of students in a wide variety of upstream course offerings. Further signaling his commitment to training and education, Mr. Tearpock’s numerous articles and published works, including Applied Subsurface Geological Mapping (1991), Applied Subsurface Geological Mapping with Structural Methods (2003), and Quick Look Techniques for Prospect Evaluation (1994), are widely-used and respected industry references.

From left to right: Daniel J. Tearpock and Marty Hewitt

Upon bestowing the 2012 Heritage Award, current DPA President Marty Hewitt remarked, “Your business not only with SCA, but your leadership with the DPA and AAPG has taken this award to a whole new level.”

Reflecting on this honor, Mr. Tearpock commented to the assembly, “One of my goals was to do something significant for the world.  At first I thought I could find that billion barrel field, or find some new energy technology to help people…It ended up being training and consulting.  We’re now at over 23,000 people that we’ve trained, and the people we’ve trained are all over the world finding oil and gas.  Our consulting company has helped people find and develop over 6 billion barrels of oil equivalent.  So in a roundabout way, I was able to accomplish what I set out to accomplish in life…I could not find a better group of friends and associates than I have found working in the oil and gas industry.”

More about Daniel J. Tearpock:

As a working geoscientist, Mr. Tearpock has generated numerous exploration and exploitation prospects, either as the sole generator or as part of an organized multidisciplinary team. Mr. Tearpock was a finalist in 1996 and 1998 for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year program and in 1998 received the Distinguished Service Award from Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geology from Bloomsburg University, 1970; and a Masters in Geology from Temple University, 1977. He is a (AAPG/DPA) Certified Petroleum Geologist No. 4114, State of Texas Licensed Geologist No. 2660 and (SIPES) Certified Earth Scientist No. 3015.

Mr. Tearpock is a member of numerous associations including the AAPG, SPE, SIPES, SEG, GSA, HGS, EAGE, NOGS, LGS, IPA, SEAPEX & PESGB. He is the past President of the AAPG’s Division of Professional Affairs (2011-2012). He is a founding member and current Chairman (2011-2012) of the intersociety “Joint Committee on Reserves Evaluator Training” (JCORET). The member societies represented on JCORET include the AAPG, SPE, SPEE, SEG and WPC.

About SCA

Subsurface Consultants & Associates, LLC (SCA) provides superior upstream consulting, direct hire recruitment, and geoscience and engineering training to stakeholders in the oil and gas industry.   Find out more at www.scacompanies.com

To view a video of the DPA Heritage award presentation, please visit SCA’s Upstream Petroleum YouTube Channel. 

Some perspective on the relative cost of gas

As reports on the rising cost of gas once again capture news headlines and ignite debate, it's a good time to take a closer look at gas price relative to other products in common use.  Even if prices reach $4 a gallon, gas is a bargain compared to most other consumer products.  See the graphic below for a powerful visual.   What other products do you think it would be fun or interesting to compare?

Hat tip to The Big Picture and Flowing Data.