Innovations in my past

Perhaps I ought to make it clear that I am interested in technology innovations and breakthroughs, not the sort of minor incremental improvement that comes from adding yet another attribute mapping function to a widely sold interpretation system, for example.
In my humble opinion, such innovations and breakthroughs tend to come from smaller to medium sized, more entrepreneurial, companies, not from the ‘big battalions’. Let me describe a handful of experiences which lead me to this conclusion.

Way back in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s, BP – in common with other Majors - tried its hand at in-house software development, aiming to build its own GIS data storage and mapping system (I think we called it GANDALF?), it’s own well log storage and interpretation system (WISARD?), it’s own seismic processing system (I forget the name) and it’s own seismic interpretation system (SEIS and then SIIS). It proved to be tremendously difficult to develop systems that met our users’ quite varied needs, to anything like the promised budget and schedule. Fortunately, we came to our senses rather quickly and realised that there were some great innovators ‘out there’, in small companies led by entrepreneurs, who were much better at this stuff than us – and we quickly dumped our in-house efforts in favour of Finder, Promax, Geoquest and Landmark, and so on.

On a different tack, the tremendous improvement in exploration success rates that occurred from the mid 1990’s onwards was due to the availability of large regional or ‘exploration’ 3D seismic that enabled us to explore the Tertiary sediments of the Gulf of Mexico, Deep Water Angola and Nigeria, Trinidad, the Nile Delta etc etc. The innovations that enabled us to access such 3Ds at remarkably low unit cost were introduced by two Norwegian companies, at the time one medium sized, one small, namely Geco and PGS, who transformed the acquisition technology that was being deployed.

Finally, I recently spent a couple of years as a board member of the Danish company Welltec who, under innovative and entrepreneurial leadership, developed a set of robots that run on wire-line (“tractors”) together with associated well work tools; their equipment is of much higher quality and reliability than that available from (bigger) competitors. The technology reduces by nearly an order of magnitude the cost of working in the reservoir (compared with using a rig or a coiled tubing unit).

Welltec and PGS are a couple of exceptions to my further observation that in general innovative and entrepreneurial companies do not necessarily fail (well, of course many of them do!) but instead are absorbed on success into the maws of the behemoths, the whales – Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, perhaps Weatherford. I recall that at the beginning of this decade, my former employer decreed that henceforth we would tend to contract with such whales, it being troublesome and inconvenient to have to manage the supply chain with lots of minnows in it……..thereby accessing lots of incrementalism but cutting ourselves off from real innovation.

So to finish this week’s blog, here’s a question for anyone who wants to reply – can you point to one technology that was invented in one of the major, major oil field service companies that improved anybody’s exploration success rate?