Gulf of Mexico Wells Reloaded

Story map to wrap a complex technical dataset into easy-to-follow steps. Opening video helps reach out to board rooms or town halls alike.

"Data and Maps: a simpler Workflow"

[Note: this complements Part III of A Day in the Life of...  ongoing blog post series here]

A day in the life of a petroleum professional - Part III - shorthand

[2018 Update -  presented at AAPG Visiting Geoscientist Program in Budapest in 2015 and Szeged in 2018 with open data for 2014 and 2018.

2016 Update - PUGonline Geospatial Workflow catalog summarised this as: Development & Planning > Mapping Well Data

2015 Update - A higher level article is published by PPDM Foundations in its Q4 2015 issue]

This is Part III of a "A day in the life of..." posts, to introduce basic petroleum data management for professionals who generate prospects. This is a yet even simpler workflow that helps rapid project start-ups for prospectors rather than data managers.

A day in the life of a petroleum professional - Part II - shorthand

[Update: posted here an even simpler workflow that reads government data direct from web]

This is Part II of a A day in the life of posts, to introduc Basic petroleum data manipulation for professionals who aren't data managers. This is however a much simpler workflow that lends itself more to rapid project start-ups for petroleum rather than data professionals.

A day in the life of a petro-data manager - Part I - Shorthand

[Update: a simpler workflow that uses  for-fee & for-free software is posted here]

After intoducing the process to extract, transform & load  (ETL) www.boem.gov well data into a www.ppdm.org database, here is the short version expanded over on my sister blog.

A day in the life of a petro-data manager - intro

[Update: Talend made the early version complex, so simpler one was posted later]

Have you ever been given plain text geodata and wondered how to database and map it? And has this happened to you lately with tens of thousands of lines of data? Well help is at hand! Here is an ETL  workflow (extract, transform, load) useful to any data manager in or out of petroleum using free tools:

To Geo or not to Geo, that is the question...

... at least in oil&gas. I always wondered why petroleum was only 5% Esri's market (unofficial from my tenure as petroleum manager there, they publish no figures as a private company). A current rationalization project at an oil major hinted why - I've 'pushed Geo' for 25 yrs. so I saw that in my previous tenure at Halliburton, but that only crystallized later - whilst a large percentage of data has a spatial component in oil&gas, only a small part of it is stored in spatial databases. GIS are generally for surface infrastructure like geology, plants and pipelines, rather than for subsurface exploration and production. Surface data can actually be seen and measured directly on or near the ground, whereas subsurface are interpolated data from drilling and seismic deep in the subsurface. Indeed the challenges in oil exploration in the news of late revolve around this frontier.

"... 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.

IQPC show in Kuwait City

Attended this small and personable show and met some friends old and new - vendors were invited into the talks and plenty of time was left in between to meet&greet.

Back home again

TS Eliot's header quote indicates that I'm back home again: to bridge geoscience and GIS in petroleum I've done for a while now - see on my LinkedIn how long - it isn't hard to believe then, that I dusted off a master data management diagram from over a decade ago:

"Better metadata for GIS"

Just posted my two-page extract from the June issue of Digital Energy Journal:

We are going to see much more improved "metadata" system for geo-graphical data - which will help integrate it much more closely with bigger information management systems, writes Andrew Zolnai, sales and marketing director, Interactive Net Mapping Ltd.

Of business and blogging

A few months ago I signed up for Area 51 Satck Exchange for GIS, and it has impressive statistics indeed. Soon after, however, short holidays then family emergencies and continuing oilelefant meant that I hardly participated at all. Nor have I blogged much this month, and that situation will continue... And I missed today's AGI w3g!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Time for reflection coming up to the anniversary of reconnecting with my current business partner David Lloyd to help oilelefant to market.

Trending oilelefant.com, Part II

Recent web hit statisitics show the power of press releases (PR) in Oilvoice and FindingPetroleum (née Digital Energy Journal) to push traffic to oilelefant.com. The occasion was the new release of a secure trial area - try before you buy - to show on the internet what it will look like on the intranet.

Trending oilelefant.com

My talks at FindingPetroleum and PPDM presented the impact of the new web in petroleum.

Standards & Metadata - Part VII

Facebook/twitter diary excerpt from an information manager:

Vast majority of information is not held on computers but in people's heads
If Information is Communication, then what is Metadata?
Monday E&P IM mantra: METADATA. METADATA. METADATA
Data, data everywhere. Hidden. [...] High value. Low awareness
Would like to take a broom to the data management techniques used

Rebranding conferences

Last week I presented at the PPDM London User Group Meeting, and the week prior at Finding Petroleum's (FP) January Conference.

What is next big thing?

Recent groundbreaking news abounds, and both an exciting and challenging times lie ahead.

"East is east and west is west...", or is it?

Geo-meta-data news flashes:

quickly access web resources regardless of resource location via ESRI's geoportal extension

free metadata tools for the EU INPSIRE website using ESRI Irelands Be-Inspired site

quickly add data anywhere in the world, crowdsourcing debut on Google Map Maker

geocode data into the recently increased Google palette in the US at least announced

The Joy of (con)Text

It's a common geo-rant (thanks AGI'09) that metadata cause alternatively boredom or angst among geo-geeks - why? because we know our data, our professional audience does too, but our wider audience does not. In other words, if we don't write metadata, no-one else will understand the context later on. I found a clear example, when I mapped Captain Cook's ships logs a while ago, and posted on ArcGIS Online beta: