Simple reservoir depletion modelling

Following on last week's Teapot Dome 3D dataset, here's the first step toward upgrading my most popular Slideshare post: Geoscience class notes have an option to run ESRI Model Builder that comes with the Spatial Analyst extension. Simply reversing reservoir topography and applying a surface run-off model, will mimic the depletion of reservoir of its petroleum content. The same way water flows downstream though gravity, petroleum will flow up-slope through hydrostatic recharge (in other words buoyancy pushes hydrocarbons up on top of denser water and out of a reservoir).

Guns & Roses, or: 3D GIS anyone?

[Update 2: layer package can now be found as Teapot Dome Six Pack on PUG Online
Update: RMOTC was sold off in 2015, their ftp site is now gone, ask for available copies]

The Guns part is the colorful history associated with the Teapot Dome. A remote Wyoming oilfield once a sleepy Naval Petroleum Reserve, the Teapot Dome Scandal was, however, the biggest to rock Washington DC until Watergate... or the oil industry until the Enron collapse! Read this introduction to a book excerpt: Marines Invade Wyoming - From the Halls of Motazuma to the Oil Fields of Teapot Dome, for cape-and-sword intrigue from ranchers and oil barons to US senators and the White House...

"... with a little help from my friends", part III

25 years ago this week, I left the Natural Resources Canada to start a business with Teknika. I was encouraged (if not pushed) along by a fellow geologist, who had a comprehensive petroleum geocomputing system at Husky in Calgary - his colleague encouraged me at University of Calgary to take a class in computer sciences, the same department where Jim Gosling later on created Java. I teamed up then with a brilliant surveyor who delivered a video-tracing system. These were the DOS days when we used AutoCAD as the graphics prior to Windows. And as my banner note states, he spatialised AutoCAD with a 10Kb DOS kernel that might've given Intergraph and Esri a run for their money, had AutoDesk picked it up at the time.

Clouds gathering over the horizon, part V

Will spectacular outages of AWS and now BT cloud services casts a pall over the excitement that has reached even politicians? And now comes this geopolitical issue only hinted at by MSFT's tribulations in Europe over Internet Explorer. This posted in Germany (Google Chrome will translate this page for you) by Ruth Lang - 'SVG queen' to Dino Ravnic 'web vector king'.

Your team is your friend

I am so proud of my teams at client sites and in our office! One team achieved in 6 months at one site what many thought would take years - to integrate surface and subsurface exploration and production infrastructure for an oilfield in 3D+time. Another team created just this week a real-time GIS data capture system that reduces to 4 steps what took 10 on paper - and of those only the first one is manual.