More thoughts on the "Ten Habits"

Our popular April 2012 blog entry, "The Ten Habits of Highly Successful Oil Finders" has received some positive press lately.  As the basis of a talk, the habits were presented at the AAPG Playmaker Forum in Houston this past January, and were also covered in the Houston Chronicle. Now, we are honored to report that the habits, as conceived by Dan Tearpock and colleague Bob Shoup, are featured in the March 2013 edition of the AAPG Explorer.

In the article, SCA Founder and Chairman Emeritus Dan Tearpock delves further into the value and importance of what is also referred to as a "philosophical doctrine" guiding his and his company's professional activities.  We invite you to review some excerpts (please see the full article here):

"Developing a successful product, i.e. good prospect, is only part of the value of the 10 habits; they can be used in both directions. 

'If you drill a dry hole, the company asks what went wrong and they may hire an expert to come in and reverse engineer the prospect, tear it apart to find where the mistakes were to cause a dry hole,' Tearpock noted.'We call this step forensic geology. 

'They may find you didn’t use the 10 habits correctly, so you made a mistake in interpretation and drilled a dry hole. 

'That’s the marvelous aspect of this philosophical doctrine and the habits in it,” he said. “It can be used both ways. 

'What some people do is when they drill successful wells, they tear them apart and see what the team did to drill this successful well,” Tearpock said. 'They use the habits again to go in and see what they did and then find they pretty much followed a philosophy similar to these habits – and that’s why they had success.'

Tearpock is quick to note that this philosophical doctrine is not exclusive to SCA. 

'Some people have come up with these habits on their own,” he said, “and I don’t know how many.'

He also cites a real-world example from his own experience leading SCA:

"SCA sent out three teams for four months and evaluated a hundred proposed prospects, along with some of the dry holes from earlier. They determined what the explorationists were doing wrong. 

'For the most part they weren’t using the habits at all, except for the European division working the North Sea, which was running at an 85 percent success rate on exploration prospects,” Tearpock said. 

'This group had a 150-page manual that was literally like taking our 10 habits and expanding on them to a great degree. 

'We found that the VP of exploration and several other explorationists there had come from the company that originally conducted the study of why certain people and teams are more successful than others,' he said. 

'They brought that knowledge with them to their new company, put it into practice and showed the success it can provide' Tearpock noted."

We are pleased that the Ten Habits continue to inspire discussion. Are there examples you can share of when the application of the habits or philosophical doctrine has contributed to exploration success in your professional life? Or alternatively, when neglecting the habits has resulted in dry holes or less successful results?

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 Two: Knowing the Tectonic and Depositional Environment

by Bob Shoup

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

Successful oil finders have a strong background in geology, and have a thorough knowledge of the tectonic and depositional environments for the area in which they are working.

Just as a strong foundation is essential to a good house, a strong background in geology is essential to being a successful oil finder. For most geoscientists, that foundation is set in school and augmented in the early stages of their career with corporate training. Unfortunately, for all too many in the industry, this is the extent of their geologic training.  

Just as a well built house requires periodic maintenance to stay structurally sound, a long-term successful career as an oil finder requires continuing education. Our industry is rapidly evolving, and it is essential to stay in the know on new trends and technology. After all, how much did the majority of us know about the potential for developing hydrocarbons from shale when first starting out? Additionally, continuing education is critical when moving from one geologic setting to another.

Take for example the case of an experienced geophysicist, who shall remain unnamed. He had almost 20 years experience exploring in and mapping growth fault-related plays and prospects in the Gulf of Mexico. He was known to be a successful oil finder. But then he was transferred to a position in the North American fold and thrust belt. His first assignment was to explore in a complex thrust belt known to have fault propagation folds as the main structural style. This geophysicist had little if any training in fold and thrust belts, but being known as an oil finder, he was expected to succeed in his new assignment. 

In this assignment, the geophysicist analyzed the geology not from a fold and thrust perspective, but from the extensional perspective he was familiar with. He mapped the key faults with listric geometry with hanging wall rollovers that have insufficient normal displacement from the structure (Figure 1A). The vertical separation is too small to make a rollover with that much structural relief.  In addition, the downthrown side is higher than the upthrown side.

Also note that the faults associated with this fold belt are fault propagation folds. Kinematically, they propagate upward from a decollement, causing the beds at the front of the fault tip to bend or kink forward. The fault has more of a planar shape ramping upwards, often from the flat of another major fault surface (Figure 1B).

Due to using an inappropriate structural model, the interpretation was incorrect and the prospective structures were in the wrong position: dry holes waiting to happen. His colleagues challenged the resulting interpretation and maps. An audit found over 100 mistakes and mis-ties.

These career-jeopardizing mistakes could have been avoided if the geophysicist had obtained additional training. Who should have been responsible: management or the geophysicist? One could argue that the company should have seen to it that their employees had the appropriate structural training for the area in which they were assigned. However, successful oil finders should take it upon themselves to ensure that they have the appropriate knowledge of the tectonic and depositional environments for the area in which they are working. This may require several additional training courses, as well as some applied mentoring before the geoscientist goes off on his or her own.

Are you seeking to learn more about specific geographic regions or deepwater reservoirs? Do you need to refine your knowledge of seismic sequence stratigraphy or structural styles? 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.