Greater computer processing, memory, and projection/visualization capacity will allow Texaco geoscientists to load and interactively examine 5 times the amount of 3D seismic data that could be viewed at once on a conventional workstation. Photo courtesy of Texaco.

Texaco Exploration and Production has begun making expeditious analyses and drilling decisions that result from interactive, large screen visualization of seismic and other three dimensional data.

Centerpiece of the corporate visualization center is a spherical screen 25 ft wide and 9 ft tall whose high resolution, panoramic, 160° view field can be observed by a roomful of managers and teams of geophysicists, geologists, and engineers.

A pumpkin shaped room or pod inside a 3,500 sq ft, state-of-the-art facility in Southwest Houston houses a supercomputer and projection equipment Texaco said will help its people sharply reduce 3D seismic project cycle time, boost production from existing fields, and find more reserves.

Oil and gas related applications of the visualization center include reservoir engineering, plant walkthrough simulation for facilities/piping design, and new field exploration.

The center houses a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 infinite reality supercomputer configured with 8 processors, 3 graphics pipelines, and 6 gigabytes of main memory.

Unique setup

The facility was one of only 10 of its kind worldwide when under construction. The number in use is increasing rapidly, but Texaco's is the only one dedicated oil and gas E&P.

The system can project onto the wrap around screen at once a fully interactive visual image that incorporates 3,500 sq km of 3D seismic data. This volume will rise to 6,000 sq km by early 1998. Existing disk storage capacity of 120 gigabytes is to expand to terabytes within months.

"No other major energy company in the world can do what Texaco can right now with 3D visualization," said Michael J. Zeitlin, portfolio manager for Texaco's visualization technology.

"Texaco has applied 3D visualization technology in several fields throughout the world. Each application has provided us with a clearer picture of field structure and has resulted in improved production. Earlier applications of this technology have improved our cycle time from months to weeks for evaluating data.

"We made a commitment to develop this technology in order to expand its use everywhere in Texaco."

The company has this edge because its people developed proprietary computer software that allows the viewer to move, slice, section, and even walk through images supported by large quantities of data in real time. Texaco uses this technique to plan well locations and review prospective opportunities.

This speed of manipulation, achieved via the system's scalable, high-bandwidth, low-latency architecture, has not been available until now.

What it can do

An operator using a computer cursor to control the image can pick a horizon, display its extent, and show its points of contact with adjacent strata in a minute or so. This function would have taken about a week on existing workstations with this much data to evaluate, a company geophysicist said.

Among 3D seismic screen images shown journalists was a seismic cube with a depth of 4-5 km.

The company has already gathered with some of its partners to make interpretations and decisions in the room. In one case, a team picked 8 sites for drilling in a large existing oil field with near unanimity. The system is also expected to result in greater well path accuracy.

Any form of information that can be expressed as voxels (x, y, z, datavalue) can be visualized in the pod. Examples besides seismic data might include information from closely spaced well logs, gravity and magnetic fields, remote sensing data, sidescan sonar image data, and cultural items such as oil and gas pipelines, gathering systems, equipment distribution, oil and gas movement, and volumes in pipelines.

Geoscientists will shortly begin reserving time slots to use the room, probably 24 hr/day. Those in other Texaco offices soon will be able to view displays from the visualization center on their existing workstations.

Costs, benefits

Using commercial software, Texaco displayed for journalists a 3D interactive view of its Petronius platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Obvious was a suspended, unconnected length of pipe floating in the immersive image of one deck, the result of a drafting error and easily corrected.

But Zeitlin said the perceived-and now realized-benefits of 3D seismic interpretation are what justified the facility's construction.

The center was brought to reality in about a year on time and within a $3 million budget. That included about $1 million each for the building, computers, and the team's time and work.

Representative costs of $14 million for a 3D survey and as much as $40 million for a high risk exploratory well place the center's price tag in perspective.

"It was a technical risk, but not a business risk," Zeitlin said. "We knew there was a chance it wouldn't work since the computer software didn't exist."

Texaco does not foresee renting the room to other operators due to the expected large internal demand.

A later stage of the visualization technology might allow the simultaneous display of financial information and instantaneous calculations of how drilling, steam injection, or other engineering decisions, for example, might affect it.

The center's ultimate goal is to add dollars to the company's balance sheet, said Dr. Ronald J. Robinson, president of Texaco's Technology Division. He said Texaco has a major management initiative under way aimed at early commercialization of seven other advanced technologies.

Other sectors using this visualization technology are communications, manufacturing, government, entertainment, science, and education. The first center was built in 1994.

How it came about

Here is a development time line:

August 1996: Texaco team visits Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, Calif., and views prototype of the visualization center.
June 2, 1997: Construction begins.
Sept. 15, 1997: Building is completed at Texaco's E&P center.
Oct. 21, 1997: Programmers and geoscientists begin running programs.
Nov. 11, 1997: Texaco demonstrates the facility for journalists at its official opening.

Copyright 1997 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.