With twenty-five plus years experience as an explorer and a principal in both entrepreneurial and technical roles in the oil and gas industry, in January of 2001 Roice decided to stop building tools and to start using available commodity and proprietary tools to find and participate in the ownership of hydrocarbon reservoirs. Dynamic Resources Corporation (see http://www.walden3d.com/dynamic) is the primary business mechanism for this work. Dynamic is currently wholly owned by Roice, although his goal is to distribute ownership among a NetWork of proven professionals as they contribute to the success of Dynamic. Dynamic's work is based around the Prospect Machine, which is an integrated methodology of data mining and pattern finding in geotechnical data across the scale of basins, play fairways, and fields or prospects. The results of this work are called CLPs (new exploration Concepts, Leads, and drillable Prospects). This work leverages Roice's experience, as described below.
As a co-founder of Continuum Resources International Corporation (http://www.continuum-corp.com), Roice pioneered human scale visualization of geotechnical data. The data being reviewed came from databases, like "The Significant Oil and Gas Fields of North America Database" sold by Richard Nering of NRG Associates. Continuum's goal was to be able to interactively retrieve data from Landmark, GeoQuest, or SMT projects, from Oracle or Access databases, or even from an Excel spread-sheets. Although Continuum Resources got in financial trouble after Roice left, his work there demonstrated a new way to work on and to present project results in an intuitive natural manner. He has a lifetime license to the Continuum VITOSSM software, and has developed alternative ways to do this type of visualization.
Walden 3-D, Inc. was formed in May of 1990 (see Walden 3-D, Inc.), and has provided a consulting and new company incubator since then. Consulting focus is on integrated geotechnical projects (emphasizing interactive 2-D and 3-D seismic interpretation) and designing responsive environments (improving information and knowledge management and computer visualization of designs). Both areas of interest emphasize the use of hypertext and hypermedia computer technologies, as well as development of virtual enterprise business concepts. Through Walden 3-D Roice worked closely with Roger N. Anderson of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York. This work started with studies of temperature-pressure driven dynamic replenishment of Eugene Island 330 through the Global Basin Research Network, and has continued with the Lamont 4-D Seismic Consortium, the Lamont Portfolio Consortium, and the formation of C.E.S., LLC, and vPatch, Inc. (see http://www.vpatch.com In addition Roice worked for BHP for about a year on their subsalt team. As a result of this team's work, BHP won leases on over 70 Federal Lease Blocks in the Gulf of Mexico. Roice also worked for the Bureau of Economic Geology for over a year. This work involved being the 3-D seismic interpretation geophysicist on collaborative teams with Corpoven and Lagoven, respectively doing a production drilling study in the Orinoco heavy oil province (providing over 165 drilling locations), and a regional stratigraphic interpretation in the southern half of Lake Maricaibo.
As the initial founder and Chairman of the Board of HyperMedia Corporation, Roice learned what can happen when a company is underfinanced and when an unidentified competitor has a new and different business model. HyperMedia's X-Windows, Motif, client-server hypertext technology was developed in 1988-1990 at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) under contract to Landmark Graphics Corporation. HyperMedia Corporation was incorporated on 04 January 1991 to exploit this technology and take it to the market place. Note that NCSA Mosaic was originally designed and programed for the X-Window System by Marc Andereessen and Eric Bina and Version 1.0 was released in April of 1993. Bill Gates decided to build the browser which became Explorer on April 5th, 1994. Netscape was incoporporated as Electric Media on April 7, 1994, changing it's name to Mosaic Commmunications, and in November of 1994 became Netscape Communications. HyperMedia Corporation's revenue history was $42,507.17 in 1991, $376,513.00 in 1992, $642,022.27 in 1993, $407,369.94 in 1994, and $529,966.27 in 1995. HyperMedia was positioned to own the hypermedia market. Undercapitalization, cyclic problems in the primary initial market (oil & gas exploration and production), and the wrong leadership for company day-to-day operations doomed success. Significant knowledge was gained in information technologies, in addition to solving meaningful information problems for Aramco, Fletcher Challenge Petroleum, the Global Basins Research Network, Mobil Oil, and Unocal. Roice owns HyperMedia's HyperEdge software, and uses it almost daily in his consulting work.
Roice is best known as the initial founder of Landmark Graphics Corporation, which was sold for U.S.$560 million to Halliburton a few years after Roice left. The interactive seismic interpretation technologies developed and marketed by Landmark have changed the way all oil companies explore for new and extended hydrocarbon reserves. Roice designed Landmark's first interactive interpretation user interface and functionality, specifying software enhancements, new product requirements, and setting strategic direction. He procured sales and joint marketing agreements and created markets for Landmark in Australia, Canada, China, Europe (including Hungary when it was still behind the iron curtain), India, Latin America, and the domestic United States. As the only oil company interpretation geophysicist initially on Landmark's staff, Roice had the opportunity to work on all of Landmark's customer's toughest interpretation problems. Roice has assisted and trained clients for his entire career, doing a lot of training courses while at Landmark. Courses include: Best Practice methodologies; Interactive Interpretation Techniques; Interactive Sequence Stratigraph; Information Management for Multi-Disciplinary Teams; Maps, Models, Immersion, and Collaboration; and New Technologies in Exploration Geophysics.
Fred Hilterman recruited Roice from Mobil to be a Senior Research Scientists at the University of Houston's Seismic Acoustics Laboratory (SAL). Roice created and managed the AGL (Allied Geophysical Laboratories, see http://www.agl.uh.edu). This involved creation of four new labs from SAL: RCL (Keck Research Computation Laboratory); IPL (Cullen Image Processing Laboratory); WLL (Well Logging Laboratory); and FRL (Field Research Laboratory). This work also resulted in increased sponsorships for SAL from 33 to 42 oil industry companies with funding from sponsorships and donations in excess of $3,000,000. The growth in personnel at the AGL and associated labs rose from 17 to 65 employees during his tenure. He has published or presented 175+ papers, including the book New Technologies in Exploration Geophysics: Gulf Publishing Company, 281 pages, 1983; and the article, "Introduction to Interactive 3D Interpretation," Oil & Gas Journal, V. 79, No. 40, pp. 106-125, 1981, which forecast the impact of interactive interpretation technologies. (click here for presentation / publication list). The physical and numerical models Roice and the SAL staff and sponsors built, acquired data over the physical models, processed, and interpreted have provided him with a unique understanding of the seismic response to various structural and stratigraphic traps.
He acquired, processed, and interpreted seismic data at Mobil Oil in Dallas, as well as for two summers at Amoco in Denver. As one of two geophysicists running four company seismic crews for a year and a half, he had the opportunity to collect seismic data under a wide variety of conditions all across the United States. He worked Gulf Coast lease sales, interpreted one block and coordinated the first Brazil lease sale for Mobil, reinterpreted Statfjord for unitization meetings to Mobil's considerable benefit, and worked for Mobil Producing Nigeria for a couple of years. The new platform at Asabo Field in OML-70 was from one of his interpretation projects. Most oil company and Landmark experience was related to interpretation, and included projects in a wide variety of basins and geologic environments all across the globe. These include: Alaska; Andaman Sea; Argentina; Brazil; Canada; California; China; Colorado; Columbia; Florida; India; Ireland; Israel; Italy; Louisiana; Mauritania; Mexico; Michigan; Montana; Mozambique; Nevada; New Mexico; New Zealand; Nigeria; Norway; Ohio; Peru; Saudi Arabia; Senegal; South China Sea; Texas; The Cameroons; The Netherlands; Turkey; Uruguay; Utah; Venezuela; and Wyoming.
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