Paradigm™ Customer Newsletter, Vol.2 Ed.1 February 2009

Please take the Certain Vision Feedback Survey -- Click here to begin

New Paradigm Training course: Paradigm Geolog® 6.7 Geosteer Who should attend? This introductory course is for new users of Geolog Geosteer.  The course is of special interest to geoscientists who plan high angle or horizontal wells, are involved in the drilling of high angle or horizontal wells, and professionals who participate in petrophysical and structural postmortems of these wells. What will the course cover? The class teaches you the basics of using Geosteer by guiding you step-by-step through a typical workflow including: Creating a Geolog 3D geological model Offset wells Planned wells Actual GS well (after drilling) Actual GS well (with Plan) LWD Images Reporting LWD Resistivity What's New on Paradigm Website Paradigm has enhanced the Media Center on our Web site - www.pdgm.com - to provide our customers with up-to-date information in an easy to use format. One of the new additions is: Regional Newsletters - Interested in learning what Paradigm is doing around the World? Paradigm Regional Newsletters are now available in our media center in a variety of languages. Check out more at www.pdgm.com! Paradigm™ Sysdrill® 2009 Launches at 2009 SPE/IADC Drilling Conference Paradigm, one of the largest contractor-independent providers of well planning & drilling engineering software solutions, will launch Paradigm Sysdrill® 2009, at the 2009 SPE/IADC Drilling Conference taking place March 17 - 19 in the RAI congress center in Amsterdam. Sysdrill® 2009 combines advanced well planning, survey management, torque and drag, hydraulics, casing design, cementing and well control. The package is tightly integrated with Paradigm Geolog® (petrophysical log interpretation) to provide the industry's only commercially available real-time geosteering solution. The conference attendees are invited to the Paradigm booth (#24) on Tuesday, March 17 at 17:00 to celebrate the launch of Sysdrill® 2009. Attendees are also invited for live on-demand demonstrations of Sysdrill® 2009 to see firsthand how Paradigm enables drilling engineers to quantify wellbore accuracy, improve drilling safety, and reduce drilling uncertainty and risk by facilitating quick and accurate well design. Demonstrations of related well planning and drilling engineering workflows, as well as new geosteering workflows using Paradigm GOCAD®, Paradigm Geolog®, and Paradigm OpsLink™ will also be available. New 2009 Trade Press Articles Please check out our Media Center for the latest released scientific articles written by or featuring Paradigm employees. These articles address the unique effort Paradigm puts forth to solve today's E&P industry-related problems using groundbreaking science and state-of-the-art technology. Here is an abstract of "Geologic Modeling for Seismic-Driven Reservoir Characterization": " This latest article highlights the use of Paradigm SKUA for the generation of geologic property models of impedance to constrain a multi-angle and multi-channel simultaneous inversion operator. Because the reservoir zone and overburden are faulted, modeling of reservoir properties must be performed with minimal amount of grid deformation. Paradigm SKUA models properties in their depositional (pre-faulted) state avoiding modeling deformation error. The synergy of the Paradigm SKUA reservoir property model and Paradigm Vanguard simultaneous inversion, results in high quality seismic-driven reservoir characterization output volumes that guide, with confidence, reservoir interpretation in development fields." Click here for the complete article. Paradigm™ Launches Fully Integrated Customer Support Site On February 16, Paradigm launched a new Customer Support Site. With brand new features and a total redesign, the Customer Support Site will improve your customer experience and make it easier to get the information you seek. What are the key benefits of the new Customer Support Site? This site gives users a single point of contact with Paradigm Support for the entire Paradigm suite of products. The simple and easily accessed interface is very user-friendly and gives users the option to subscribe to notifications and gain access to product downloads. Customers will be able to access an improved knowledge base with robust search capabilities prior to sending their questions out to the support team. It provides users with the ability to log and trace submitted issues. What other changes can you expect? In order to ensure that incidents are correctly routed through the system, it is important that we gather your correct contact information. We are asking our customers to set up a new account the first time you access the new Customer Support Site. This is a simple process that takes only a few seconds of your time. Paradigm will continue to provide phone support from its different regional offices but now all calls will be logged into the new system as incidents. This means that when you call, a record of your issue and the solution provided will be entered into your account for future reference. And, you will receive incident notifications that will keep you updated on the status of your request. We value your input and suggestions. Surveys will regularly be sent after resolution of a case to gather feedback and assess your experience on the site and with our technical staff. Better tracking of incidents, easy reference by users to solutions, and a commitment to continuous improvement are just some of the examples of how Paradigm is working to provide you with up-to-date tools that meet your unique needs. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact support_info@pdgm.com Paradigm™ VoxelGeo® New Features in Epos 4 Paradigm™ VoxelGeo® continues to serve the oil and gas industry as a business critical 3D seismic interpretation, investigation, and data mining solution, combining voxel-opacity, optical stacking, formation sculpting, and detections, with computer assisted structural framework tools. This industry standard will see significant upgrades with the upcoming Paradigm Rock and Fluid Canvas™ 2009 | Epos™ 4.0 release. The main change in VoxelGeo (version 4) for Epos 4 is the total revamp of the user interface to a style more consistent with the Paradigm SeisEarth™ family of applications. This adjustment was made with the benefit of a graphical user interface toolkit called Qt. The benefit of using this toolkit is that it is also available for the Windows operating system so that a future port to Windows will be simpler. An example of the new VoxelGeo View window is shown below. Fig. 1: VoxelGeo new View Window The view window has Display Elements controller on the right as in SeisEarth applications. A vertical color bar was added and the status bar has moved to the bottom of the window. Some icons are shared with SeisEarth applications. The Qt toolkit enables toolbars to be customized and torn off and moved within the view window. Hot keys are also customizable and are now shared with SeisEarth applications. There have been some user interface changes that are VoxelGeo specific. The opacity and histogram stretch controllers have been combined to make it easier for a user to adjust the range of colors to a data range that is partially opaque. The display of well data supports more content, for example log curves, which can be defined for all wells rather than well by well.[...] Read more here. Greetings from James Lamb Vice President, Americas Happy New Year and welcome to the first issue of Certain Vision for 2009. This quarter, we are launching the new Higher Order Workflow Lunch & Learn Series here in Houston. Whether you are involved in geophysics, geology, petrophysics or engineering, these informal sessions show you a progressive, efficient workflow that optimizes vast amounts of data to help you identify opportunities throughout the E&P process. If you are interested in bringing any of the sessions to your location, please don't hesitate to contact your local Paradigm sales manager or email us. On Thursday, March 26th, "Salt Interpretation, Modeling & Velocity Model Update" kicks off the series. Space is limited, so mark your calendar and make plans to experience 60 minutes of Higher Order Workflows! Upcoming Events H.O.W. Lunch & Learn Series -  Higher Order Workflow 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm (CST) Lunch is served at 11:30 am 820 Gessner, Suite 400, Houston, Texas 77024 Lunch and Learn Schedule March 26 - "Salt Interpretation, Modeling & velocity Model (Grid) Update" April 30 - NEW! "Introducing Paradigm StratEarth - Integrating Seismic and Wellbore data for Advanced Dynamic Stratigraphic Interpretation" May 28 - NEW! "The Art of Stratigraphic Volume Interpretation for Geomorphologic Interpretation" June 25 - NEW! "Advanced Geologic Modeling featuring Paradigm SKUA2009 and Paradigm GOCAD2009" July 31 - NEW! "Integrated Well Planning, Drilling Engineering and Geosteering - featuring Paradigm Sysdrill 2009" To register, please contact Carmen Comis or call 1-800-888-3273, ext. 4833 Upcoming Training Courses  The training courses schedule can be viewed here or by visiting the Paradigm training website. For additional information contact Joyce Miller call 1-800-888-3273, ext. 4883. Introducing Paradigm™ Epos™ 4 - Platform for next generation solution enablement In 1997, Paradigm began a project to develop a common seismic file system for its application suite. Introduced in 1999, this platform was designated as the company's first infrastructure release, and was recognized as the industry's first seismic data analysis system. The new platform allows for file sharing between our seismic processing, velocity modeling, depth imaging, time to depth conversion, and seismic inversion applications. Over the next five years, Paradigm entered a period of product line expansion with an aggressive internal development and technology acquisition program. This expansion broadened our footprint significantly in seismic interpretation, seismic characterization, well log and petrophysical analysis and well planning and drilling. To accommodate the expanding product offerings, and encourage workflows that exploited it, Paradigm delivered two other major platform releases (Epos2™ (PG2), and Epos3™). These platform releases introduced new data servers, new SQLite repositories for selective data types, broadened our client-server architecture, and converged on a rich and common well data model. The common well data model (Geolog®), created the opportunity to carry out workflows that required geophysical and petrophysical (G&P) data to enhance the characterization and interpretation of development fields. Do you want to know more, read here. 2009 Geologic modeling for seismic inversion Joanne Wang, Stan Jayr, and Duane Dopkin, E&P, February 2009. Extracting more from seismic data to get better subsurface models International Hydrographic & Seismic Search, February 2009. Q4 2008 Anisotropic Local Tomography Zvi Koren, Igor Ravve, Gladys Gonzalez, and Dan Koslofft, Geophysics Vol. 73 No. 5, October 2008. Adopting game-changing innovation in E&P Philip Neri, Oil Review Middle East, November 2008 Explore Visualization in Seismic Driven Pore Pressure Prediction Joanne Wang and Duane Dopkins, Oilfield Technology, November 2008. A Breakthrough in Full-Azimuth Imaging and Interpretation Zvi Koren and Duane Dopkins, E&P Daily News, December 2008 Z-To-Depth or Resizing an Image Bob Van Nieuwenhuise, E&P Daily News, December 2008. Fracture Solutions Gary Pekarek and Franck Pichard, Oil and Gas Investor, December 2008. (continued...) Fig. 2: Channel detected by 3D Propagator with "number of descendants" attribute The new version allows interpreters to store propagator attributes such as the number of descendants or to display of geometric attributes such as horizon dip and azimuth. These latter two attributes are useful for identifying spikes in the horizon surface and may be used to edit horizon picks. An example of a propagator attribute is shown on the right. The 'number of descendants" attribute shows how many subsequent horizon picks were propagated from this trace. The seed point was placed on the thalweg of the channel on the displayed cross line. The attribute has managed to track the thalweg of this channel in black. This is just one example of a depositional attribute that can be "mined" from the 3D volume of seismic. Fig. 3: Dual volume rendering with P-wave in color and S-wave as opacity control This version allows views showing two volumes to use one for color and the other to control opacity. An example of this can be seen in Figure 3 on the left. An opacity setting on a shear wave volume has been used to control the display of a p-wave volume. We believe that these infrastructure changes, interface changes, and market take-up of Paradigm interpretation solutions will encourage a host of new VoxelGeo users and will also encourage application of VoxelGeo to a host of different oil and gas field assets. (continued...) Over the last four years, the oil and gas industry and Paradigm experienced some significant changes that demanded a substantial upgrade to Paradigm infrastructure. These market and company changes included: Demand for advanced exploration and development solutions to increase global oil and gas reserves. Large scale adoption and global deployment of the full portfolio of Paradigm applications by major oil and gas companies. Acquisition of Earth Decision and associated subsurface modeling solutions. Development and deployment of next-generation solutions in full azimuth imaging, regional to prospect scale interpretation, and paleogeochronologic modeling. To accommodate these changes, Paradigm began work on its largest infrastructure release ever. Scheduled for global deployment in 2009, defining themes of the platform (Epos4™) release include: Provide a platform for multi-site, multi-user, and multi-survey engagement without interruption in activity. Provide a robust platform for managing distributed exploration and development data, while enabling access to more data. Deliver application and data access consistency across a broad spectrum of products to strengthen cross-product and cross-disciplinary workflow continuity. Connect interpretation and modeling applications. Deploy a common high performance computing infrastructure. Fig. 1: Epos Architecture - Distributed Data Model To deliver on these themes, the Epos4 infrastructure moves towards a full client-server architecture with new and comprehensive interpretation and project/survey services to complement existing well log and vertical function data services. These services facilitate and stabilize the many data transactions that can take place when working with a distributed data model and provide high levels of flexibility when working with data at the project level. These data services are augmented with new data model extensions, security and access controls, and data management tools that provide a single point of access to data across all applications. Additionally, the Epos4 release completes the deployment of a broad range of data repositories. Optimized for each data type and based on the industry-standard SQLite repositories, these data stores facilitate rapid access to a large number of data files and types with support for advanced relational-type queries. The Epos4 platform will also incorporate access to more data through new OpenSpirit data connectivity tools. These tools will complement existing interoperability tools in use by our customers. The platform also includes infrastructure changes specifically designed to enhance our customers seismic processing to seismic imaging workflows; regional-to-prospect scale interpretation activities; and interpretation with modeling workflows. The latter is achieved with new Epos-GOCAD®/SKUA™ connectivity enablement. Our customers eagerly await deployment of our applications on this new platform with the goal of impacting and improving their practices, turnaround time, and quality of E&P deliverables.   Comments on the newsletter   I  Contact us