Oil & Gas - Maximising Recovery Programme (formerly SHARP) IOR Views

Half a century ago, Wallace Pratt stated that "oil is first found in the minds of men". This has become a mantra for the oil industry, spawned across the Web, repeated by people who no longer associate the quote with Pratt. Bizarrely, it has been used by management of at least one company to justify the ‘right-sizing’ of their exploration department, presumably on the grounds that half the number of people doing the same job would have to think twice as hard. Despite the misuses of the phrase, and allowing for the fact that now women are just as likely to be doing the thinking, few people would disagree with the sentiment.

Throughout the industry we have innumerable examples of innovative thinking that has opened up new frontiers. Once upon a time, the idea of the North Sea as a petroleum province was laughable. In California in the 1970s, people scoffed at the idea that cherts (porosity and permeability as close to zero as made no difference) could contain reservoir oil. Few people in the early 1980s would have predicted that within 20 years, the main business of most oil companies would be exploring for oil in pools that had already been discovered. Ten years ago, the idea of using repeated seismic surveys to monitor field performance through time was pretty far-fetched. We all work in a world where these wacky ideas are commonplace. All of these radical thoughts can be traced back to small groups of people who were given freedom to think and an opportunity to put their ideas into practice.

These are stories that everyone knows; stories that form part of the mythology of our industry; stories that are told to encourage a spirit of creativity among us gropers in the subsurface. Everyone pays them lip-service, but (and this is a huge but), few companies have space for the genuine mavericks who are responsible for the paradigm shifts in the industry. This is a crucial issue for universities training geologists and geophysicists for the petroleum industry. How should we educate the next generation of professionals? Should we continue with the well-trodden paths of the last thirty years and concentrate on the basics of subsurface education, leaving the companies to teach their recruits the technological skills, or should we be going straight for the technological jugular in our training? Or should we do something different?

These questions were discussed at a meeting organised by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists as part of their Annual Convention in Houston in 2002. There were two schools of thought. The smaller, but perhaps more vocal group held that universities were doomed, as they could not keep up with the developments in industrial technology; as a result, companies were going to have to undertake far more of the basic training themselves. This view is flawed on two counts. First, it ignores the fact that most university departments where we educate petroleum geologists are actually quite well-supplied with hardware and, thanks to the generosity of schemes like the Landmark University Grants, we have more modern software than some companies. Second, and more important, this view elevates technology to first place among the objectives of the education and springs from a view of staff as work-station jockeys with no room for creative thinking. The larger group of speakers held that it takes longer to learn the vital concepts of four-dimensional thought than to learn to use a bit of software (however advanced). Universities should concentrate on the former, and leave the companies to do the latter. This was the view that prevailed. As a university geologist, this was music to my ears; I left the meeting in a glow of smug satisfaction, convinced that the “workhouse” view of petroleum education had been vanquished.

Students Confront Reservoir Scale Features in Utah

However, since that time, I have taken over running the Petroleum Geology MSc course at the University of Aberdeen, and the questions are no longer abstractions to be debated in humid Houston, but real choices to be faced in sunny Aberdeen. In particular, the questions that had not been addressed in Houston nagged away. Where is the place for creativity in petroleum education? Can it be taught, or, if taught, will it be a lesson learned? These questions are important, as most companies now attempt to identify characteristics in addition to academic ability in their recruitment procedures. Team skills, potential, and creativity are the holy grails for recruiters. Even though most companies probably cannot accommodate the true mavericks, they do value “maverick-lite” a low-cal, fibre-free version of the real thing.

So if we are to try to inculcate creativity, when and how should it be done? Within the UK, the bedrock of petroleum geology education are the various MSc and MPhil courses: petroleum geology at Aberdeen, Imperial and Manchester; basin evolution at Royal Holloway; geophysics at Leeds; geochemistry at Newcastle; fluid dynamics at Cambridge; and petroleum engineering at Heriot Watt and Imperial. All of these courses have a common problem: time. They are taught in 50 weeks, which includes a period of 12-16 weeks for a project to be carried out, two or three weeks for field work or off-site visits, two or three weeks of revision time, two weeks for exams, and perhaps a day off for Christmas. This leaves about 26-30 weeks in which to deliver the syllabus. As the frontiers of the subject grow, so does the time pressure and all of us who direct these masters courses perform the annual timetable juggling act. The question of where to put “creativity education” is acute. Probably the best way to foster this skill is in group projects, but these are time-consuming and take some effort to organise well, so what is the correct time balance? In my department, we devote about three weeks to these activities in the lab, plus a further two weeks in the field; I am not sure if this is the optimum, but the only alternative would be to lengthen the MSc courses, making them more expensive and cutting the number of people who would take them.

These questions have been brought into sharper relief for me by the fact that the MSc course in Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen is 30 years old; to mark this anniversary, we will be holding an alumnus event on 25-28 November 2004. This is a notable milestone, but at road markers like this one, looking forward is as important as looking back, and the forward view is dominated both by the questions that I have discussed in this article, and a host of potential time pressures that I have not mentioned. Should we be teaching courses on geological sequestration? Do we need to address the science of climate change? Will the oil industry of the future merely be a provider of carbon chains for the chemical industry?

I do not pretend to have all (or indeed any) of the answers, so this article is in the nature of a plea for help. On Friday 26 November, we will have a meeting both to celebrate the success of the Aberdeen course over three decades and to look forward to the challenges of the next three. The event will be entitled Future Geological Challenges in Energy Education. There will be a wide variety of key-note speakers, including Roger Slatt, Director of the Sarkeys Institute in Oklahoma and John Kaldi, Director of the Australian National School of Petroleum in Adelaide. We hope that a large proportion of the 400 graduates of the course will be able to attend and make this a memorable weekend.

Just as importantly, we hope that many industry professionals (even those with no connection to our University) will attend the meeting and share your thoughts. You are all welcome.