H. Roice Nelson, Jr. likes to find things, particularly when what he helps to found discovers oil and gas. He was the initial founder of Dynamic Resources Corporation, Landmark Graphics Corporation, Continuum Resources International Corporation, HyperMedia Corporation, Walden 3-D, Inc., and Dynamic Oil & Gas Corporation. Roice is an entrepreneurial geoscientist with deep roots in the international oil business. As a geophysicist at Amoco, Mobil, the University of Houston's Seismic Acoustics Laboratory (SAL), Landmark, Continuum Resources, consulting for about a year each for BHP as part of their subsalt team and then for Corpoven and Logoven through the Bureau of Economic Geology, as well as his more recent projects, he has spent over 25 years interpreting seismic data from many major geologic basins. The areas Roice has worked are shown in the image below (to the nearest 5o degrees longitude and 2.5o degrees latitude). Click here for an approximately 5,000 x 3,500 pixel gif image of this map, or click here or on the map for a similar sized gif image with higher resolution (1o degree longitude and 0.5o degrees latitude). He prefers to work as part of a multidisciplinary team, where the proper expertise is applied to identified exploration and production problems. Most of his geoscience experience is in hydrocarbon exploration with emphasis in 3-D seismic interpretation.
Work as a geoscientist has provided him solid experience in seismic
data acquisition, processing, and interpretation. His seismic data
acquisition training included work on seismic field crews in Rock
Springs and Green River, Wyoming; The Great Salt Lake; Kalamazoo,
Michigan; offshore Nigeria; and offshore The Cameroons. Then running 4
seismic crews for 1 1/2 years resulted in extensive field experience in
Hugoton, Kansas; Mesquite, Nevada; Alvar, New Mexico; Findley, Ohio; on
an Opseis land telemetry crew in Sayre, Oklahoma; Cedar City, Utah;
Seminole, Pecos, and Laredo, Texas; as well as Gillette and Big Piney,
Wyoming. These crews used a variety of sources, including shear-wave
vibrators, P-wave vibrators, shot hole, Poulter staked explosives,
surface explosives, as well as high frequency air guns on a barge in the
Great Salt Lake, regular air guns, and the various pressure and
shear-wave piezoelectric elastic wave propagation through physical
models at the SAL. Half a dozen noise studies were conducted and
interpreted. Six months of seismic processing experience was
supplemented by processing the physical and numerical model data at the
SAL.
Regional interpretation projects include: The Quaternary sediments
of Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming; The Andaman Sea, Indonesia, Malaysia and
Thailand; offshore Argentina and Uruguay; 16.5 million acres offshore
Brazil; The Gargano High, Italy; The Gulf of Kutch, India; West
Casamance Permit, Senegal; and a regional study of the Adua, Asabo,
Enang Area of OML 70, offshore Nigeria; subsalt mapping for BHP Petroleum;
sequence stratigraphy mapping of southern Lake Maricaibo in Venezuela;
and AMI-034 mapping of the Texas Shelf. Detailed seismic interpretation
projects include: Block F-7 in the Dutch North Sea; West Cameroon Blocks
508 and 509 and East Cameron 262 in the Gulf of Mexico; Block II
Offshore Brazil; Statfjord, Norwegian North Sea; bright spot studies in
OML 70, Offshore Nigeria; dozens of projects with Landmark Graphics
customers, including a year study of the Jiji subbasin for the Bohai Oil
Field, People's Republic of China; participation with an interpretation
team working up High Island A339/A340 and A563 for Pennzoil in the Gulf
of Mexico; evaluation of 15 open blocks for BHP Petroleum in the Eugene
Island area, Offshore Louisiana, for the 10 May 1995 lease sale (BHP won
2 of these blocks with a combined bid of $508,470 for one of the prospects, and
Chevron / LL&E won the other key identified prospect with a bid of
$575,000.); the 3-D Landmark interpreter supporting a multidisiplinary team
of geoscientists and engineers from the Bureau of Economic Geology and Corpoven
in a heavy oil study in the Orinoco Basin of Venezuela (resulted in 165 drilling
locations); interpretation of Matagorda Island 519 BP Virtual Prospect offering
(BP bought all 8 prospects); detailed 3-D interpretation of major deepwater discovery offshore
Nigeria; interpretation of 4 4-block 3-D subsets of Fairfield data on the
Texas Shelf; etc.
Entrepreneurial activities have always been an important part of Roice's undertakings. A successful entrepreneurial activity was as General Manager and principal administrator of the Allied Geophysical Laboratories (AGL) at the University of Houston. Roice managed the conversion of the 17 researchers, graduate students and staff at the SAL into an integrated set of 5 research labs with 65 employees. The five research labs mirrored multidisciplinary industrial activities: The Field Research Laboratory (FRL) for seismic field studies; the SAL for 2-D and 3-D physical and numerical seismic model studies; the Well Logging Laboratory (WLL) for studying the controlled response of well log tools; the Research Computation Laboratory (RCL) for 3-D seismic migration, 2-D and 3-D seismic modeling, and parallel processing studies; and the Image Processing Laboratory for studying 3-D visualization technologies and prototyping tools for interactive 3-D seismic interpretation.
The most successful entrepreneurial activity to date has been the founding and growth of Landmark Graphics Corporation. Landmark's major success has been in providing interactive seismic interpretation tools, particularly for interpreting 3-D seismic data. The company grew to annual revenues of $171 million in fiscal year 1995, and was sold in 1996 to Halliburton for $560 million. The part of this growth which occurred while Roice was at Landmark included building an interdisciplinary company and merging with (a) Petroleum Computing Corporation to provide interactive petrophysical tools; (b) Inverse Theory & Application to provide interactive seismic processing and modeling tools; (c) Energy Analysts to provide interactive velocity analysis; (d) Zycor to provide interactive mapping and interactive geological interpretation tools; (e) ExploiTech to provide interpretation consulting; and (f) Advanced Geophysical to provide 2-D and 3-D seismic processing tools. Roice initiated or was involved in each of these acquisitions. As the initial co-founder, he raised the first $2 million capitalization for Landmark Graphics. He started manufacturing, marketing (introducing Landmark technology in Norway, England, Australia, Canada, Hungary, India, China, Turkey, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and the various U.S. markets), field service, customer support, technology transfer, advanced interpretation training, Landmark's university program, and Applied Geoscience Research. Before leaving in July of 1992, he was actively involved in long-range planning and developing new advanced interpretation products for Landmark, including SeisCube, SurfCube, StratWorks, and FaultZap. Roice has published and presented over 150 papers at professional conventions, organized 9 state-of-the-art SEG research workshops (including the multidisciplinary Archie Visualization Workshop on 18 May 1995), and has taught numerous SAL, IHRDC (International Human Resource Development Corporation), Landmark Graphics, HyperMedia, and Continuum Resources public and private schools. The emphasis of these activities has been introducing and improving multi-disciplinary interactive interpretation developments and techniques.
From 1989 to 1992 he worked part-time at Landmark. In addition he co-founded China Cattle Corporation with Chuck Edwards, former Chief Geophysicist at Chevron, to develop a joint-venture cattle operation in Gan Xu Province of China. This project was not successful before selling out his interests. He also co-founded and later ran HyperMedia Corporation, which focused on selling to the Oil & Gas Industry Best Practices, and an UNIX, X-Windows, Motif, client-server asset management / project documentation and presentation system. Roice founded Walden Visualization Systems Corporation, which was merged with Energy Innovations, Inc. to form Continuum Resources International Corporation. Continuum's VITOSSM Product was the state-of-the-art solution for bringing data from Landmark, GeoQuest, SMT, Oracle and Access databases, and even Excel files into a common 3-D visualization environment when the company got in financial trouble. Roice founded, owns, and uses Walden 3-D Inc. as a business incubator and consulting medium. Walden was founded to develop a prototype of a new, people-scale rather than automobile-scale urban environment, through the design and building of three-dimensional intelligent cities. Walden 3-D is closely connected with several other companies. These are: Advanced Structures Incorporated, providing specialty structures and space enclosures using space-frame and other advanced building technologies; Information Design Corporation, providing computer programs to automatically generate computer visualizations of various kinds of built form (which closed down when the principal, Bill Bavinger, was killed in an automobile accident); The Gardner Partnership Architects; C.E.S. LLC; vPatch; and Dynamic Resources Corporation. Walden 3-D's charter for the next few decades is to use 3-D seismic technologies, data mining, and pattern finding to identify and own new hydrocarbon energy sources which can be used to fund and fuel building the prototype city of the future. The work for Pennzoil, BHP Petroleum, the Bureau of Economic Geology, Chroma Energy, Interactive Interpretation & Training, and others has been done through Walden 3-D, Inc.
To some degree, Roice's track record is evaluated by the impact of interactive seismic interpretation technologies on the Oil & Gas Industry. This technology has created a significant change in the way all oil companies look at hydrocarbons. This impact was forecast and documented in his book "New Technologies in Exploration Geophysics," published in 1983 by Gulf Publishing, and then translated and published into Chinese. As far as direct success in finding hydrocarbons, there is a "new" platform extending the Asabo Field in OML 70, offshore Nigeria, that was the end-result of one of Roice's interpretations at Mobil. In addition, there are the wells Corpoven, now PDVSA, have been drilling in the Orinoco Basin, and numerous projects he has supported (like discovery of the Nelson Field in the North Sea by Enterprise Oil & Gas; note this field was named for Lord Nelson's statue in Trafalger Square).
Roice thoroughly enjoys sharing ideas and training others in new technologies. Past teaching activities include:
This Oil & Gas Vita is at http://www.walden3d.com/resumes/hrn_vita.html
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