Exploring the Ten Habits - Habit Three: Managing Your Time

by Bob Shoup

In SCA’s ongoing blog series highlighting, "The Ten Habits of Highly Successful Oil Finders" we are now featuring Habit Three:

Successful oil finders plan their time and their work in order to ensure accurate interpretations and maps.

You may have heard the quote “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Unfortunately, in our industry, poor planning does result in dry holes - lots of them! One of the surest ways a company can drill a string of dry holes is to enter a rig commitment before having a portfolio of prospects that have been accurately mapped and approved for drilling. While your manager may be responsible for poor planning, you are responsible for the accuracy and quality of your maps. Rushed interpretations almost always result in poorly mapped prospects. And poorly mapped prospects are poor prospects. Your ability to deliver high quality interpretations and maps will depend on your ability to plan and manage your time.

Generally speaking, projects have deadlines. So when you begin a project you must first decide what work is needed, and when that work is needed. To do that, you, or your manager, must first begin with the end in mind. What decision is needed and what are the costs of that decision? The decision to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to a development project requires a different level of understanding than does a decision to spend tens of millions of dollars to drill a well, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy seismic.

As an oil finder, your responsibility is to determine how much work is needed to ensure accurate interpretations and maps.  How many wells do you need to correlate? How much seismic do you need to interpret? How much reservoir engineering data do you need to integrate? How many maps do you need to make? How complicated is the geology of the area you are working in? Are there legacy interpretations you can build on?  

Once you have determined how much work is needed to make good quality interpretations you must then determine how much time is needed to make those interpretations. Each of us work at a different pace, so know your pace and set realistic time frames and goals. Once this is done, go back to management and see if the time frame you need fits with the time frame that matches the business needs.

If your business time frame doesn’t meet your workflow time frame, then the workflow must be adjusted. Here the “Law of Diminishing Returns” can serve as a guideline in adjusting the decision point and the workflow.  The Law of Diminishing returns states that the continued application of effort or skill toward a particular project or goal tends to decline in effectiveness after a certain level of result has been achieved. In other words, at a certain point, more effort does not yield proportionately better results.

In our industry an optimal decision is made when all of the available data has been integrated into a series of final maps that are the basis for reserve estimation. Decisions made after this point are usually decisions that managers are agonizing over, or are avoiding, and time spent after the optimal decision point is usually not justified (see chart below).

Click image to enlarge

So begin with the end in mind and tailor your activities to meet deadlines without compromising quality.  So, looking at the graphic again, work with your manager to determine what work is needed to reach a “good” decision point?  Or, alternatively what do you need to do to get past the point of making a bad decision.  

One thing that can improve your efficiency as well as the quality of your interpretations is training. SCA has an exciting training line-up featuring short courses tailored to the requirements of upstream professionals.  Review our training calendar and take the next step towards ensuring your oil finding career is a successful one for many years to come. 

Exploring the Ten Habits - Habit One: Ensuring Interpretations Are Reasonable and Valid

by Bob Shoup

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 Ten Habits of Highly Successful Oil Finders

by Dan Tearpock and Bob Shoup

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. 

Update 3/8/13 - for more thoughts on the Ten Habits, see our recent follow-up blog post. 

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.