On the Future of Exploration in Alberta

“But in case signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”

Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, Fleet Orders, Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805.

I have never, at any time in my life, had any cause to doubt my drive, ambition or abilities. What I have often questioned, however, is whether I have the courage to be controversial. I do not believe in being controversial to be controversial. But there are times when what you must say flies in the face of conventional thinking. Those times are, by definition, controversial and if you find yourself in one of those moments, it’s not enough to simply state your point and then lament the fact you were ignored.

The white paper produced by the CAGC was a personal revelation. It didn’t say anything I didn’t already know but having it coalesced so succinctly focused me on my own responsibilities for the dire situation that the industry is in. Let’s be honest, geophysics in Alberta is on its deathbed. Conventional exploration is becoming a thing of the past and everyone is lamenting the situation and wondering if there is a solution.

There is a solution. Seismic, especially in Alberta, could enjoy a renaissance. New conventional plays could be found, and new life could be injected into existing ones. And geophysicists, who are now evolving into button pushing wiggle pickers, could be re-established as talented and highly regarded professionals. But for this to happen I must accept the responsibility to not be ignored.

The truth is that this industry is dying, and that thousands of people are unemployed because I have not been controversial enough.

What follows is series of independent, one-page essays that together define an action plan. These essays are not a rehash of the known problems affecting the seismic industry or geophysics in general. Rather, I will use them to clearly define what is, in my opinion, the central problem facing exploration in Alberta today and to propose a real-world practical solution.

For me the style of the essays is new because I have decided to also discuss some of the difficulties that I have had with a head injury that occurred within months of starting my career. I have never done that before, not because I am ashamed of what happened but because it has never been relevant. Today, it is.

We, as an industry, struggle with similar problems to what I have faced personally and there are parallels with how I have solved my problems and how I believe the industry must solve theirs.

So, the time is right, and I will be open and honest. There is just one caveat. As you read through this you may get the sense that I have led an unhappy existence. That isn’t true. The truth is that if at anytime in the past 40 years you had offered me an alternate, more rational existence, I wouldn’t have taken it.

And if today, you offered me an easier, more comfortable life, free from the challenges I am facing, I wouldn’t take that either.

Executive Summary

In December 2018, the Canadian Association of Geophysical Contractors wrote a paper “to address issues stemming from the drastic downturns in the seismic sector”. The series of essays presented here is my response to that paper and to the concerns of the Chief Geophysicists Forum about the decline in the relevance of geophysics.

Seismic, and geophysics in general, is struggling in Alberta. It is possible that by this time next year there may be no seismic acquisition companies left in the province. Oil companies are not sold on the benefits of new high-resolution seismic acquisition. In many cases, geophysics is not seen as relevant to current plays. Companies do not believe in seismic to the degree they once did and as a result, exploration in the province is in serious decline.

As serious as those problems are, they are not, in my opinion, the problems we need to focus on. The problems we need to focus on are that we, as the seismic practitioners, do not believe in seismic anymore and that we do not understand how good the seismic is that we are producing.

Seismic is a visual science but because of technological limitations, visualization, which has recently become a core discipline for data sciences and which should be a core geoscience discipline, has yet to make an impact. Consequently, our modern seismic experience is still dominated by technologies that are up to 100 years old. Those technologies are clearly out of date and are acting as a serious detriment to our own understanding of seismic’s capabilities.

It is my position, that the seismic we produce today is already an order of magnitude better than what our archaic visualizations allow us to perceive. I suggest, that by coupling modern high-resolution acquisition with state-of-the-art seismic visualizations, we can reinvigorate interest and trust in seismic both within oil companies and within external organizations.

With my unique experience with visualization, I believe that seismic, as it is presented today, falls a long way short of what it could be. I propose a project called “The Centre for Wavefield Studies”, supported by all levels of the industry, whose raison d’être is to use modern acquisition, processing and visualization techniques to determine seismic’s ultimate potential.

Prologue

I began my career in September 1977 with Gulf Canada Resources. On Tuesday, January 24th, 1978, I was taken to lunch by Cal Nixon, my immediate supervisor, and Gordon Hollingshead the manager data processing. They gave me a letter of commendation written by Gulf Corp. in Houston. “Gulf”, they said, “was very impressed with me”. They believed that I had tremendous potential and they predicted great things for my future.

The following Tuesday, I woke up lying face down on my living room floor where I had been for more than 36 hours. I had no idea where I was, who I was, or even briefly what I was. I had a Basilar skull fracture, the left side of my jaw was completely severed, and I was waking up from what we now believe was a coma. Not surprisingly, given how severe the accident must have been, I had no memory of the previous two days and no idea I had been so badly injured.

After a few minutes, I realized that I was late for work. So, without knowing who I was, or what I did for a living, I got up, dressed and went to work. I’ve worked every day since then.

Over the next 10 years, as I struggled to make sense of those missing hours, the injury would ruin my career, destroy my mind and personality and leave me emotionally mutilated. Never one to give up easy, I have fought my way back and the problems I have today are a shadow of what they were in the past. Even so, one shadow can ruin a day and so a few years ago I began to meet with a group that I will call “the professionals”.

In my first session I began by recounting the accident and its effect on me, but the professionals soon stopped me. “We don’t care.”, they said. “How you developed your problems isn’t relevant. The only thing that is relevant”, they went on, “is what are your problems and how are you going to solve them. Focusing on how you got them won’t help you”.

As the CAGC has so clearly pointed out, we have problems. The problems with being unable to convince oil companies of the value of high-resolution seismic, fit into the broader scope of the problems that the CGF is wrestling with. Geophysics in Alberta is struggling for relevance. Geophysicists are often the first ones laid off in a downturn and the last ones to be hired after an upturn. And geophysicists are being increasingly perceived as wiggle pickers and their contribution is being seriously undervalued.

Obviously, companies have lost faith in seismic and its practitioners. They have lost their enthusiasm and respect for seismic and they do not believe it can give them the answers that they want. We have a serious problem with perception and, unless it’s corrected, exploration in Alberta could come to a grinding halt.

Nevertheless, I don’t care about those problems and neither should you. Those are not the problems that we need to solve and from where we are now, we couldn’t solve them even if we tried.

What I will argue in the following essays is that our problem is that we don’t believe in seismic. I will argue that for obvious, and easily correctable reasons, we have lost our enthusiasm for seismic and our belief that it can solve the problems of the future.

I will define what, in my opinion, our problems are and lay out a strategy for how we can immediately begin to solve and move beyond them.

Do You Still Believe in Seismic?

Obviously, you must believe in seismic otherwise you wouldn’t be in the industry. But I’m not asking you a simple question of whether you think seismic is useful. The question is more complex.

Seismic is band limited. Once the amplitude of frequency has dropped below our ability to record it, it is gone and it’s never coming back. So, there are physical limits to how good seismic can be. I don’t think that any seismic practitioner believes we have hit those hard limits yet but how close do you think we are to them? How much untapped potential do you think seismic still has?

One of the reasons that I received my letter of commendation from Gulf is that I had proven that their mandated processing flow was catastrophically wrong. At the time, I had less than two months experience, I had yet to process my first seismic line and what I was saying was fundamentally opposed to established thinking. Yet, Gulf accepted my reasoning and within weeks the corrected processing flow was in use worldwide.

The reason I faced so little opposition, despite my lack of experience, was because at the time nobody believed we had seismic right. Deconvolution was relatively new; migration was just being introduced; and 3D seismic was barely on the horizon. Each new generation of technology and each new introduction of technology brought massive improvements in our ability to image the subsurface. Everybody expected and actively sought out quantum level improvements in seismic resolution. And nobody believed we were anywhere close to the limits of what seismic could tell us.

1977 was a fantastic time to begin a career. There was positive energy everywhere, digital seismic was only a decade old and we were still fascinated by what it was showing us. That enthusiasm was infectious and shared by everyone in the industry.

With that in mind, how enthusiastic do you feel about seismic today?

Today, virtually all our technologies are decades and, in many cases, generations old. Today, virtually all the improvements we see are incrementally small improvements on well-established themes. It has been decades since we introduced a technology that produced a quantum level improvement in seismic clarity and that brought with it, true industrywide excitement.

Obviously, you believe in seismic and that we can still improve it. But, do you believe that tomorrow someone will introduce a technology that will revolutionize seismic the way migration or deconvolution, or 3D did?

In my experience, the answer is no. In the 40 years that I’ve been in this industry I have seen massive changes but most of those changes came in the first 25 years. Today, many experienced geophysicists have spent their entire careers using the same tech set. They have never seen fundamental change and as a result we have, in my opinion, entered a period of seismic malaise.

We believe in seismic as it is today and that we can improve it tomorrow. Our problem, however, is that we don’t believe we can improve it by an order of magnitude. 40 years ago, we did believe it. Today we don’t believe it, which is a problem that we must get over because with my unique experience in visualization, I believe that an order of magnitude improvement is the least we can expect.

Do You Know How Good Seismic Is?

On the day of his wedding my brother went to have his hair styled. I went with him. Finishing his work, the barber stood back to admire the results. “Magnificent”, he said, “you have to admit that I am an artist.” “You certainly are”, I replied, “but it’s such a pity because it’s like Picasso painting on a burlap sack”. Everyone laughed … except my brother.

We are all in the business of producing the clearest subsurface images possible. I am fantastically optimistic about the future because I believe that we can produce infinitely clear images than we do today. If I am right, then seismic is due for a renaissance. If I am wrong, then exploration in Alberta, may die out. It is important then to understand why I have such a uniquely optimistic outlook. Let’s talk about art.

I have been fortunate to know several world-class artists. One is Robert Bateman, the great Canadian wildlife artist. His artwork is stunning, and sublime and I used several examples of it in the first chapter of my PhD theses on seismic visualization.

One of the things that Mr. Bateman is famous for is his stunning realism. His artwork is full of complex visual information and I often marvel at how real his paintings are. But imagine that I took one of his artworks and used PaintShop to make it look as if he had painted it on a burlap canvas. What would you think of it?

If you compared it to the original, you would clearly see that the transformation had mutilated a true work of art. Words such as apocalyptic would not be out of place, and if you showed the transformed image to Mr. Bateman, he would be horrified at the effect and insulted that you had so little respect for his talent.

But suppose now, that burlap was the norm. What then?

Not only would we be unable to appreciate the talent of the artist, neither would he. If Mr. Bateman were forced to paint on burlap, a medium that couldn’t do justice to his talents, he would have been unable to develop his talents. He would have been unable to express himself or elevate himself above mundane artists and even people like myself, who can barely draw stick men, would be able to produce works of similar quality.

If artists were forced to paint on burlap, they would be reduced to the status level of sign painters and I would be able to masquerade as an artist like many artists today masquerade as scientists. And no one would appreciate art.

This story, as simple as it seems, serves to illustrate the point that you yourselves do not know how good the seismic is that you are producing. Ultimately, seismic is evaluated by visual inspection and wiggle trace displays, variable density displays, and greyscale displays are the seismic equivalent of a burlap sack. They are apocalyptically bad at displaying seismic. But they are the norm and have been for generations.

If you want to know why oil companies prefer low cost over high quality, consider this. Mr. Bateman’s original paintings cost over $100,000 and there is no shortage of people willing to pay that price and who consider it a bargain.

But if he painted the same scene on burlap, no one would pay more than $10 and everyone would think it was overpriced at that.

Why Am I so Positive?

One of the things that people who know me well point out is that I am always positive and enthusiastic. It is true, I am, but these are not, however, personality traits. They are well honed survival skills.

It seems almost absurd to write the next sentence, but it’s true. Between 1978 and 1987 the professional’s opinion is that my mind absorbed more pain every minute than most people will in a year. It was constant, I didn’t understand it, and there didn’t seem to be any cause or obvious solution. I learned very early on that if I allowed myself to sink into depression, I would never get up again. As a result, as a pure survival strategy, I became a world-class self motivator.

I am still a world-class self motivator and I understand not only its importance on a minute by minute basis but that it can’t be based on hype. It is easy to lift yourself temporarily by listening to music or some motivational speaker, but the effect wears off in hours. True, lasting motivation can only come by focusing your attention on the positives. No matter how dire the situation, there are always positives and you must seek them out, obsess over them and use them to block out all negative thoughts and emotions.

We are down. I think that is an understatement. In my career, I have seen numerous downturns, but this one beats them all. The whole industry in Alberta is down. We have been hammered for years by negative press, environmental fanatics and ridiculous regulations. And that’s just in Canada. Outside Canada, oil prices seem to be controlled by a drunken lunatic. There is no rhyme nor reason to the current prices and no way to predict reliably what they will do in the future.

As for seismic, anyone who works with it must be frustrated. We know how much more we could do with modern high-resolution data, but no one will listen to us. That is the crux of the problem, no one will listen to us. So logically we have good reason to be depressed, concerned and frustrated.

We could really use some positive news, something to motivate us and lift us. But here’s the catch, it can’t be sales hype.

Hypothetically, suppose that you could, with very little effort and in very short time, improve the clarity of your seismic by an order of magnitude. That would solve most of the problems that we have today. Budgets would grow exponentially. It would excite the entire industry. The improvement would be so great that the government might agree to reshoot Alberta in high definition.

Moving beyond the hypothetical, I believe we can do that, which is why I am so optimistic about the future. I understand that to you, it sounds like just so much hype. But then we are thinking about the problem from a completely different point of view.

You are thinking about improving seismic by a factor of 10, which we can’t do.

I am thinking about not filtering out 90% of it, which we can do.

The Seismic Display Filters

We cannot magically improve the quality of seismic data by an order of magnitude. But by recognizing that seismic displays act as a filter upon the data we might get a sense that it is already an order of magnitude better than what we perceive.

My mother-in-law Ida was born in 1915 on a small farm on the outskirts of Edmonton. At 103 she is still with us today. When she was in kindergarten, the Canadian, Reginald Fessenden, developed the earliest version of reflection seismology. He used wiggle trace displays to show the results of his work. Given the technology of the day, what else could he use?

In the past 100 years all we have done to improve them is add fill to one side. We did that in the 60s, when electrostatic plotters came out. Beyond that, wiggle traces, which are one of our primary means of communicating seismic information, are virtually identical to what they were a century ago.

In the mid-60s, Amoco used the newly developed electrostatic plotters to convert seismic amplitudes to shades of grey. I haven’t found an example of one but given that humans can only simultaneously perceive between 20 and 50 shades of grey, it’s doubtful if it was very different from what we use today.

Putting this into context, I was in grade school when Amoco developed grey scale displays. Digital seismic was in its infancy. We hadn’t developed deconvolution or migration and even stacking was new. So, how poor was the data compared to today?

But how different would it look compared to today?  The answer is that it would look virtually the same because we still display seismic using the same uncommunicative washed out ghostly grey images.

Variable Density Displays came out in the late 70s, as I was just beginning my career. They were developed to show instantaneous seismic attributes and not seismic. I was one of the first people to use them to display seismic itself. Thinking I was being innovative, I used a drum plotter and a red, white and blue colour palette to display a 12-fold seismic line. When I presented it at the weekly processing meeting, it was fiercely criticized, and I was told that no interpreter would ever use it.

Eventually, in the early 80s, we started to display seismic on computer monitors. We also needed a better way to see bright spots. As a result, even though variable density displays are essentially chromatic square waves, we were forced to use them. Again, given the technology of the day, what else could we use?

Wiggle trace displays, greyscale displays, and variable density displays, despite their outmoded nature, define the modern seismic experience. But they belong to what is now technological antiquity. Surely, it can’t be that difficult to realize that they are not equal to the task of displaying modern seismic.

It doesn’t matter how good your seismic is if you can’t prove it. One washed out ghostly grey image looks virtually the same as any other washed out ghostly grey image. One set of wiggles looks virtually the same as any other set of wiggles. And one square wave display looks virtually identical to any other square wave display, despite how pretty but uncommunicative the colours are.

The fundamental problem we are all facing; that is stifling exploration in this province; that is keeping thousands of people out of work, is that you cannot prove the value of modern seismic because at the final stage, you are filtering out massive amounts of critically important information. And you won’t until you accept that the displays that you are using to make your point are apocalyptically bad filters.

Are We Below the Point of Recovery?

We have been hammered for years, I get it. We have problems at all levels, we all get it. The question is whether this adds up to geophysics in Alberta now being below the point of recovery. Before we talk about how we can recover, first everyone needs to decide if Calgary still has the energy to recover.

In October 1981, I had the idea that I could solve the near surface statics problem by using interactive ray trace modelling. I had no evidence for this, the idea existing only in my own mind. I also had no idea if it were technologically feasible to do interactive ray trace modelling. Still, I spent a Sunday afternoon typing a four-page summary of the idea and two days later I presented it to the Chief Geophysicist at Canadian Superior.

We talked about it for about an hour and then, knowing that statics were a serious problem, and that this was an interesting prospective solution, he agreed to fund my development. It took me six months to develop the system. I then ran it as a service for four years before selling it to Western Geophysical where we used it to calculate the statics for all the early 3D’s shot in Alberta.

Calgary in the 80s, and for decades afterwards, was a hub for development and many of the major technologies in use today had their start here in that era. In those days it was possible to give four presentations a day, two in the morning, two in the afternoon, and you could even take someone else for lunch in between. And all you had to do, to arrange it all, was pick up the phone.

Let’s move forward to today.

Today, I am trying to introduce fundamental new technologies. I have researched them for almost 20 years. The technologies are desperately needed and can, for virtually no cost, provide a massive improvement in subsurface clarity. I am also connected, via LinkedIn, to virtually every geophysicist in Calgary. I regularly post articles on LinkedIn about my work and they are incredibly popular, some of them garnering more than a thousand views.

I also, when I want to talk to people personally, obsess over how I do it. Before I contact them, to break the ice, I send them a 3D printed seismic business card. They are incredibly popular. I also spend hours researching the companies and trying to make my messages brief and appropriate. Despite this, the response rate from Calgary geophysicists at all levels … is virtually zero.

Trying to contact people in oil companies today is total a waste of time and I am not the only person who is saying this. From being the most open and progressive segment of the worldwide exploration industry, Calgary has become a cloistered backwater. People are fooling themselves if they think that Calgary is still a hub for innovation. It used to be, but that energy and enthusiasm has left the province.

I am not the only one who is incredibly frustrated with this Calgary specific problem. I regularly talk with, and present to, companies in the UK and Europe, in the US, in South America and all over Asia. In other words, places I can’t get to. Yet, I can’t get even a response from anyone in companies right next door.

I have no power to force my way into an oil company to show them how we can, together, work to solve critically important problems that they know they have. Unless companies invite me in and take an active interest in what I’m doing there is no way forward. So, this bunkered down mentality is the first thing that must go if seismic and geophysics in general is to survive in this province.

Wavefield Reconstruction

Given the 100-year history of seismic and the 50-year history of digital seismic, it seems impossible that there is something truly significant that we have forgotten to do. But we are emerging from technological antiquity and what we can do today is very different from what we could do just a few years ago.

After all the acquisition has been done, we are presented with a whole bunch of numbers. We know where each number is in time and space and the job of the processes is to assemble those numbers into something meaningful. Because they are just numbers, we could, if we wanted to, apply any mathematical formula to them. We do not, however, because seismic, from survey design to the very end of processing, is a theoretically dominated process.

Everything that we do to seismic has, at its core, the understanding that seismic is an analog acoustic wavefield and every process that we apply is theoretically founded on that concept. There is nothing that we do that is not theoretically correct. And everything that we do is done with the understanding that we are, through acquisition, sampling an analog wavefield and, through processing, attempting to reconstruct that analog wavefield.

Which makes it very strange that at no point do we ever attempt to physically reconstruct the wavefield.

Think about music. In concept it is virtually identical to seismic. It begins life as an analog acoustic wavefield. We record and process it digitally using virtually the same processes as we do with seismic. But before we listen to it, we pass the processed digital information through a speaker which physically reconstructs the wavefield. If we didn’t, we would have no way to experience it.

The same should be true of seismic. Before we look at it, we should always reconstruct it. There is nothing so obvious as that fact. Music is an analog acoustic wavefield and before we listen to it, we must reconstruct that analog wavefield. Seismic is also an analog acoustic wavefield and before we look at it, it makes sense that we should also reconstruct it.

That we never have is not because there is any theoretical reason why we shouldn’t. The reason is that visually reconstructing a wavefield is far more complex than reconstructing an auditory wavefield. Reconstructing and visualizing a seismic wavefield takes massive amounts of compute cycles and it has only been practical for about a dozen years. As a result, the seismic industry has evolved without being able to perform its most important task.

Reconstructing the wavefield is what it’s all about. When we design a survey, we do it in such a way that we capture enough information that we can ultimately reconstruct the wavefield. When we process a survey, we do it to produce the most accurate and detailed description of the wavefield. But it is that word description that is important. All we end up with is a series of numbers that describe the wavefield. They are not the wavefield until we use them to reconstruct it.

This is my most fundamental point. If we are to make progress, reinvigorate seismic at all levels, and re-establish geophysicists as talented and essential professionals, this is the point that we must seize upon:

If seismic were invented today, there is something that we would always do now that we never do now …  we would always reconstruct the wavefield.

Wavefield Visualization

As an industry, we are finally taking advantage, especially in processing, of the power of modern GPU’s. What we are not taking advantage of, however, is what they were designed for in the first place. GPU’s were developed for Virtual Reality and it’s time to consider how we can use it.

Unquestionably, the most significant impact associated with any new technology comes with its first use. After that each successive generation produces incrementally small improvements. Take migration for an example. Modern migrations are significantly better than the original Stolt migration. But I was around when the Stolt migrations came in and I can attest to the fact that the difference between a Stolt migration and no migration is greater than the difference between a modern reverse time migration and an original Stolt migration.

Moving forward, to regain the industry’s trust and to rekindle its enthusiasm for seismic we need, not an improvement on what are doing today, but new, virgin technologies. Fortunately, we have one, gift wrapped and ready to be used.

Up until about the late 90s, advancements in computer technologies was driven by industry. After that time, with the introduction of NVidia’s TNT2 graphic card, advancements have been driven by gaming. It is sometimes difficult for those of us in technical fields to accept that our future depends upon games but it’s a fact. For the past 20 years, computer technology has been driven by the desire to visualize and interact with photo realistic environments.

Today, with the development of NVidia’s new ray tracing technology, it is possible to sit at your computer and enter worlds that are virtually indistinguishable from reality. They are exciting, vibrant and completely engaging. Why this industry is deliberately ignoring the technology is beyond me.

Modern seismic, as the CAGC rightfully points out, is the equivalent of 4K UHD TV. Why is it so hard to convince geophysicists not to display it on the technological equivalent of a 1960’s black-and-white TV?

I research and develop virtual-reality seismic displays. They are readily understandable by other disciplines. I have written papers on them, I have given luncheon talks on them and I have developed software, so people can use them. Yet, despite their tremendous visual appeal, the technology is ignored.

I understand the CAGC’s frustration with having the Alberta exploration industry largely ignore the benefits of modern seismic because I have the same frustration with it for actively ignoring the benefits of modern visualization.

Modern seismic is science’s most complex data source. It is a complex mosaic of overlapping and often contradictory events. It is rife with rich amplitude details, subtle fault plane reflections and delicate and easily decimated events. Reducing all this complex information down, as we do, to a few dozen shades of grey or turning it into a chromatic square wave, is simply absurd.

There is a missing element to exploration. It’s called virtual-reality. We need to obsess over creating virtual-reality images of our seismic. I have been doing that for years and I know how good seismic really is. If you knew, you would be able to convince those in power, be it upper management or government agencies or the general public, of the need to invest in high-resolution seismic.

But if you persist with visualizing 21st century seismic with early 20th century displays you will fail.

Best Available Practices

In 1969, I sat a series of 2.5 hr scholastic aptitude tests. One of the tests was in logic. I completed it in 35 minutes, handed it in unchecked and was the only student in Ontario that year to get every question right. Apparently, I am very good at logic but so what? Logic, without the courage to be controversial, is useless.

About two years ago, I was talking to my daughter about the difficulties of getting the industry to pay attention to visualization. Since she was studying environmental law, she insisted that I was taking the wrong approach. I have always taken a scientific approach, expecting that people will get the point. She suggested a legal argument. “You are asking them to pay attention”, she said, “when you should be telling them that they are legally required to pay attention”.

I had to admit that she had a point, but I dismissed the argument as being too controversial. But is it too controversial and even if it is, does it matter? We exist in an ethical and legal framework that demands that we use best available practices. As the sole proponent of seismic visualization, I am uniquely positioned to understand that visualization must be a core element of best practices. As I said at the outset, it is not enough to state your point and allow yourself to be ignored. In the context of ethical and legal best practices, if I sit back and allow that to happen, I am guilty of professional misconduct.

Exploration, as we all know, is inherently risky. Seismic can never give us a completely clear picture of the subsurface. Even at its best, it is band limited and there are finite limits to both spatial and temporal resolution. It is inundated with coherent noise, it is naturally in time when we want it in depth and many of the processes that we use to assemble it have serious theoretical and practical limitations.

As a result, every well comes with both financial and environmental risk factors. A loss of caprock integrity that causes fracking fluids to escape to the surface is an environmental and public relations disaster. Wastewater injection that reactivates an unknown fault can cause an entire project to be shut down with the loss of the financial investment. It is our job, from acquisition through processing and interpretation, to mitigate those risks knowing that we can never eliminate them entirely.

To that end, we define and adhere to seismic best practices. I know that the CGF, the CAGC, APEGA and virtually every oil company are continually evaluating and re-evaluating what our best practices should be. Not only is that environmentally and fiscally responsible, it’s also self protection. Nobody wants to find themselves in court being sued by investors, environmentalists or the government and accused of using shoddy, outmoded practices.

In that light, I will make the statement that Wavefield Reconstruction and Visualization, which are at the heart of everything that I do, are not optional. Moving forward, they are a necessary and essential component of seismic best practices and cannot be ignored.

We cannot be held responsible for not using them in the past because until very recently it wasn’t possible. Reconstructing and visualizing the wavefield takes a phenomenal amount of arithmetic. Even today, with our multi-teraflops GPUs, the reconstructions that I do are primitive compared to what will be ultimately required.

But given how obvious and necessary a process they are, and given that they are now technologically feasible, ignoring them and not working towards implementing them should soon be considered professional malpractice.

The Personal Responsibility for Taking Action

Actions speak louder than words. Often, though, the action itself isn’t as important as the fact you acted.

I have always believed that there are no last chances but by the spring of 1986 I was testing the limits. I was working for Western Geophysical, recently married and had a six-month-old son. I also had a temperature of 103, courtesy of another bout of recurrent cerebral meningitis. The resident migraine was now more than eight years old, and the acid sensation, caused by the impact of the mandible on the innovating nerves of the TMJ was, as always, torture.

I haven’t seen a doctor for more than nine months. There was no one left to see. I had seen every specialist and none of them had an acceptable diagnosis. I had been told that the solution would probably never be found. “Make your accommodation with it”, they had said, “and live with it the best you can”. Although I never consciously accepted that suggestion, I was evolving towards it and eventual total collapse.

Dr. Ken Larner, one of the industries scientific heavyweights, was working for Western. He came to Calgary to give a series of presentations and I escorted him around. At one point, he asked me a simple, friendly question. Instead of responding in the same tone, in pain I viciously snarled back the answer. When I looked at him, he was staring at me like I was a rabid dog.

When I went home that night, I sat in front of my wife and I put my head in my hands. “I can’t go on like this”, I said, “I can’t have people like him looking at me like that”. She asked me what I was going to do. I thought for a few seconds and then I said, “I’m going to solve it myself”. And I did.

Up until that moment, I had been waiting for someone else to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it. After, I took personal responsibility for finding the answer myself. It was a watershed moment and probably the most important moment of my life because if I hadn’t, while I still had the energy to do it, taken positive, definite, and assertive action, I would have simply faded out of existence.

Obviously, I am using this personal story as an analogy for where we are today in the seismic industry and with geophysics in general. I am not saying that the industry is in its death throes, although others might. What I’m saying is that we are on a downward spiral, as I was back then. Everybody, I believe, recognizes that fact but who will define the positive, assertive action that we need to take to reverse the decline in prevent us from fading out of existence?

Back then, I had to take personal responsibility for finding the answer. That wasn’t easy when dealing with the arrogance of the medical system. But I was the only person who had the requisite knowledge and motivation to force my way to the answer. That is what I am saying we must do today.

Exploration in this province could die out and with it, the future of thousands of small businesses and tens of thousands of families. We are the only ones who can stop it. We must take personal responsibility for stopping it and we must act. And it isn’t so important what action we take so long as we take some action.

With that in mind I propose that we act, collectively, to find out just how good seismic really is.

What is Seismic Ultimately Capable of?

Having worked with a different focus than everyone else, I have a very different opinion of how good seismic really is. But I’ve taken my investigations as far as I can on my own. Unless you become involved, 40 years from now we still won’t know.

On April 15, 1987, my jaw was finally reattached in a nine-hour surgery at the University Hospital in Edmonton. Within minutes of regaining consciousness, I realized that the physical problems that had torn me apart for nearly 10 years were gone. I was free, and I assumed that life would just go back to normal.

By December 1999, I had discovered that normal had a very different meaning. My mind had not recovered, and I couldn’t focus for more than a few seconds at a time. Emotionally, I bounced between euphoria and depression in seconds, a dozen or more times a day. I was manic and hadn’t slept for more than 45 minutes at a time since the operation. And I couldn’t carry on a conversation because I was filled with a deep-seated sense of rage and offhand comments could spike my anger to unmanageable levels.

Coupled with this, the industry, which years before expected so much of me, had forgotten I existed. I was irrelevant and before me was a slow decline to an anonymous oblivion that I felt powerless to prevent.

Then, on virtually the final day of the millennium, and more by accident than by design, I produced my first wavefield display. Looking at it was a revelation. It screamed volumes at me and what screamed was that I didn’t know anything about seismic at all.

By that time, I had worked with tens of thousands of kilometres of seismic from all around the world. I had built up a mindset of what I thought seismic was and what it was capable of. But it took me less than five minutes after seeing that first display to realize that this mindset was wrong and that seismic was something completely different.

Probably, if I had never had the accident and I were as normal as anyone else, I would have shrugged my shoulders and gone back to my regular work. But I wasn’t normal, and I knew it. I reasoned that if I threw myself into it and answered all the questions in my mind, all the way back to first principles, I would, in the process, rebuild my mind. It didn’t quite work out that way, but it was a good start.

The project that brought me back from oblivion was an obsessive investigation into that still outstanding question: “What is seismic ultimately capable of?” I have gone a long way to answering the question and, in the process, I’ve come a very long way back. But I can’t go any further on my own.

From this point on, you must become involved. I don’t have the data, the time or the financial resources to find the ultimate answer. I need support … and the industry needs a project.

As of this moment, the seismic industry appears to be as frustrated with its situation as I was with mine. There are a lot of parallels. People have lost faith in seismic and they are not listening anymore. There doesn’t seem to be any way through the firewalls that surrounds people’s perceptions of it. You believe that seismic has far more potential but you’re being denied the opportunity to prove it.

I have been there, and I broke out of that mould by focusing myself, obsessively, on finding out how good seismic really is. As an industry we need to do the same. We need a central project dedicated exclusively to that one question. What is Seismic Ultimately Capable of?

Beginning the Conversation

In an environment where every incremental improvement is hyped as game changing and revolutionary, how do you prove that what you are doing is game changing and revolutionary?

You may wonder why, after nearly 40 years of silence, I have chosen this moment to be open about what happened to me. The reason is that I need those experiences to establish my credibility.

We now believe that I went into a coma after the accident and that when I came to 36 hours later, I wasn’t waking up in any conventional sense. What has always surprised me is how clear my memories of that morning are. The first thing I remember is the sense that there was something I needed to do. I needed to go to work. I didn’t know who I was, where I worked, or what my job was. I just knew that I needed to go to work and, on autopilot, I did just that. Despite everything, I have worked every day since.

From the moment I was injured, there was no path back, but I found one. Given the imaging technology of the day, the freakishness and rarity of the injury itself, and the fact that it was missed at the time, my only logical future was one of insanity and early death. But, by trusting in myself, I am now neither insane and obviously, I am very much alive.

And after the surgery, when I was left intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically mutilated, there was no other future for me but a progressive decline to an anonymous oblivion. But I am now, through sheer act of will, in the position where I can, with your support, revolutionize this industry.

So, you can understand why I will be damned to hell for all eternity if I let you trivialize me as a salesman.

When I say that we carelessly discard 90% to 99% of all the information that we acquire and process, I am not talking hype. I am talking fact and whereas I don’t expect you to believe me verbatim at this point, I demand that you force me to prove it and that you give me the resources to prove it.

In 1977, when I challenged Gulf’s established processing flow, I had the least amount of experience in the room. Nevertheless, Gulf demanded that I prove it and they gave me the time and the data to do it. I expect nothing less now.

I talked earlier about the need to take personal responsibility and action. The first action that this industry must take is to talk to me. I understand the silence and the distaste for commercialization and hype, but I’ve written these essays the way I have, at significant personal cost, to prove that I am not a salesman and that this is not hype.  

I know that you have dozens of salespeople clambering for your time and attention all the time. But I am someone different, and what I am saying is very different. You need to look through all the noise created by overblown claims and realize that there are questions in these essays that must be answered.

The question, of whether through our continued use of archaic visualization technologies, we are filtering out massive amounts of critically important information, cannot go unexamined. If we are to fight our way back and reverse the current downward spiral, you must, as your first course of action, talk to me.

An Introduction to Perceptive Seismic Interpretation

In a recent article, the instructors of a course in data science at Columbia University reported that data visualization, which had long been ignored, was now being recognized as a core competency. Obviously, we are not the only ones who are new to the concept of visualization as a discipline.

Historically, data science was focused on data acquisition, manipulation and analysis or in geophysical terms, seismic acquisition processing and interpretation. Data visualization was not part of the discipline and for very good reason. It wasn’t possible.

Scientific visualization has never been truly possible in the past because technically, it is based upon the concepts of virtual-reality. And virtual-reality, for scientists, has only been made possible by the tremendous strides that have been made in graphical processing units over the past decade.

Theoretically, visualization is also based upon sciences that are very different from the ones we study in geoscience. Those sciences, which are biophysical and neurophysiological, have also undergone a revolution. When I finished my PhD on visualization, I had over 500 references of which only a handful were geophysical. The rest were biophysical and the vast majority of those were published after 1990.

Historically, therefore, we developed our visualization techniques in what is technological and theoretical antiquity. And the industry has developed the way it has because for 40 of the 50 years since we developed digital seismic, seismic visualization was not possible.

Which leads us into the problem of how we get off the ground level.

To put this into perspective, suppose I made a presentation on some aspect of acquisition, processing, or interpretation. Regardless of the subject, it is almost guaranteed that there would be people in the room who knew what I was talking about. We could have a lively and productive discussion.

If, however, the subject was seismic visualization, there would be nobody in the room who knew anything about it. Nobody has been trained in it and so there would be nobody there to discuss with. The subject is not currently on the radar, which is why, in my opinion, I am having such a hard time getting people interested in it.

Seismic visualization is not currently considered as a core discipline for geoscientists. As the people from Columbia pointed out, however, data visualization is becoming a core discipline in other sciences. There is, therefore, an immediate and pressing need for a course that teaches the fundamental principles of seismic visualization.

Geoscientists are schooled in the principles of seismic acquisition, processing, and interpretation. In other words, the sciences of how to produce the best quality data. They must also be schooled in the techniques of how to take that data and produce the best visualizations of it.

Not surprisingly, I have developed a two-day course to do just that. It’s called “An Introduction to Perceptive Seismic Interpretation” and I will be ready to present it in early February. The course encompasses everything I’ve learned about Wavefield Reconstruction and Visualization and if we are to get off the ground level and start to explore what seismic is really capable of, every geophysicist in Calgary needs to take it.

The Centre for Wavefield Studies

In 1980, I was managing a small seismic processing centre. I went back one day to visit some of my friends at Gulf. I found them in a very relaxed mood, playing pitch pennies in a hallway. It’s been a long time since anyone in an oil company had that much free time.

The central theme of these essays is that we, as the seismic practitioners, have lost our faith in seismic’s future because we do not understand what seismic’s ultimate potential is. We have an immediate and pressing need, therefore, to find out what that potential is.

If I am right, and that we have barely scratched the surface of what seismic can tell us, then our future is incredibly bright. If we produce a quantum level improvement in subsurface clarity then all our problems with upper management, with governments and with the public can be mitigated. Seismic and geophysics in general could enjoy a renaissance like the one brought about by the original introduction of digital seismic.

If I am right.

We have a responsibility to the tens of thousands of people in Alberta who rely upon exploration for their livelihood to discover the truth. If we do, there is the distinct possibility that we could convince the Alberta government to reshoot segments of the province using high resolution modern seismic. We could convince them to become active rather than passive participants in exploration. There are lots of precedents. The NFLD government is one, the UK Oil and Gas Commission is another as are governments in Africa, Asia and South America. There is no reason that Alberta should not do the same thing.

But first, we need the proof.

Finding that proof is the problem not because it can’t be done but because nobody has the time to find it. There is nobody in any company in Alberta today who has the time to pitch pennies against a wall. Everybody is busy, workflows are well-established, and time is at a premium.

This is where I come in. I have the time, the motivation, and the unique skill set to find the proof. Obviously, however, I can’t find it working unfunded, without data, and alone. Knowing how important this question is, last year, I developed a proposal for a project called “The Centre for Wavefield Studies”. Its purpose is to put together a central location where we can, collectively as a group, and individually as separate companies, explore seismic’s ultimate potential.

The centre is to be located somewhere on the +15 in downtown Calgary so it’s easy to access. It will have the latest in presentation technologies and it will have a large open space in which we can do training, hold seminars and make presentations. It is a great idea and it is what the industry desperately needs but it didn’t go anywhere because I couldn’t get into companies to talk about it.

That situation must change. If there is one thing I expect from these essays, it is that they have convinced you of the need to talk to me. Oil companies, processing companies, acquisition companies, the CSEG, the CAGC, the CGF, APEGA, and every other organization needs to get behind this project. We are wasting our seismic and because of it we are destroying the future of the province.

Get behind me, give me the resources and the data and let’s together work towards answering that ultimate question: “What is seismic ultimately capable of?”.

Chasing a Black Swan

“I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?”

Napoleon Bonaparte

One of my favourite books is The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The central theme of the book is that nobody can predict the future. The future, he says, is controlled by rare, one-off events that come out of nowhere and change everything. He proves that supposed experts, who make their living predicting the future, get it right less often than those who make random guesses.

If, when I went to the party on January 28th, 1978, you asked everybody who had ever known me to predict a thousand possible futures, nobody would have even come close. Who could predict that the following day a freakish accident in an indoor soccer game would irreversibly change my life, my personality and my career. And who could predict, that more than 20 years later, a single word from a teenage boy would start a cascade of events that would give me the chance to put it all right.

In late September 1999, I was working out of a home office in Kelowna BC. I was crying. I wasn’t unhappy or distressed, it’s just that my emotions were, as they always were in those days, unstable. Five minutes before I had been fine, then they flipped, I was overwhelmed, and tears streamed out of my eyes. Five minutes later they would’ve flipped back. I ignored it all, masked it with eye drops, and just kept working.

I had no interest in visualization or graphics or Wavefield Reconstruction or any of the subjects that have dominated my life since. Then, my 14-year-old son walked into my office hoping I would buy him a new graphic card. I wasn’t interested, and I told him to go back and finish his homework. He started to leave but as he got to the door he turned, and he said, “but dad, it has a gigaflop”.

The word gigaflop got my attention. We started to talk and for the first time I got a sense of the CPU to GPU paradigm shift that was taking place in the computer industry. That in turn started me on a project to find out how powerful these new GPUs were. That in turn took me into visualization, which took me back to University for my PhD, which forced me to rebuild my mind, etc. etc. etc., to the present day.

So, I don’t worry about the future. I simply look to put myself in a position where Black Swan events can happen. I look out for them and if I find one, I try and take advantage of it, like I am doing here.

Visualization is a Black Swan event. It is something new and unexpected, and if exploited properly, it can change everything. It is the disruptive technology that this industry desperately needs.

As we have, for the past 50 years, we are trying to improve subsurface clarity by improving the quality of seismic data itself. We are looking for better acquisition, improved migrations, a better understanding of rock properties, etc. etc. But these aren’t working for us and you must recognize that fact. They are not giving us the quantum leap of clarity that would reinvigorate interest in seismic.

Visualization will. It is coming from a direction only I have been looking. It doesn’t improve the data, but it massively improves our experience of it. And it will, if you get behind it, learn about it and obsess over it, change the future in ways nobody today can predict.

When I read the paper by the CAGC, I instantly recognized it as a Black Swan event for me. I have taken the chance to write these essays the way I have so that you will recognize that together, they are a Black Swan event for you.

Epilogue

This is the first time in my career that I have allowed my personal history to enter my work. Writing these essays has been, therefore, an “interesting” experience. I don’t intend to repeat it. I knew, when the essays started to evolve, that they were dangerous and that because of their personal nature they might be rejected. If you’ve gotten this far, then obviously they weren’t and perhaps you have a sense of why I was motivated to take the risk.

I believe in what we do. Oil fuels the world today and there is nothing on the horizon that would change that in the foreseeable future. 40 years from now, barring disruptive energy technologies, oil is likely to be even more important, provided we can find it. If we can’t find it, the disruption will be to all levels of society.

Seismic, is to me, the most important data source in the world. We desperately need better seismic if we are to keep pace with the world’s insatiable demand for oil. What I fervently believe, and what I hope to have given you a sense of, is that seismic can be an order of magnitude better today. To me, with my unique experiences with visualization, I believe that my professional responsibilities demand that I make that point. So whatever personal risks I must take are necessary.

Since I began this on a personal note, I will end it the same way.

On Tuesday, January 24, 1978 I was on top of the world. By the 31st I was on my way down. In between was an accident that was nobody’s fault. Also in between, on the 28th, was a party and I was drunk. There were lots of parties in those days and I was drunk a lot.

Beyond being drunk, I was 25, supremely fit and incredibly self confident. In other words, I was full of myself, the alcohol magnifying my opinion. Later in the party, despite the bitter cold, I walked out onto a balcony and stared up at the moon. “Bring me”, I challenged, “the greatest challenge you can think of. I can take it”, I said, “let me prove I can beat it”.

Be careful what you wish for or don’t, the choice is up to you.

I’ve always remembered that moment because it was the last crystal-clear thought that I’ve ever had. Life, after that changed and everything was different … except the sentiment. The reason why despite everything I have always been happy is because I’ve always been in search of that challenge and I have understood for a very long time what it is.

The greatest challenge the world can bring you is the next one. It is always the next one. The only reason to take on a challenge is to learn the skills to face the next one. And the only reason to fight for years or decades, if necessary, is to earn the right to face the next one.

Overcoming challenges is what it’s all about. In the past 50 years, since the development of digital seismic, we have, as an industry, faced and overcome thousands of scientific, technical, and practical challenges. By doing so, we have learned the skills and earned the right to face the next greatest challenge.

Our next greatest challenge is to put it all together and prove, first to ourselves, and then to the rest of the world, just how good seismic really is.

I am up for it, how about you?