• Project Rationale and Goals
• Overview Presentation
• Contract/Project Plan
• Contact Information
• Register Your Interest
• SEM Technical Information

Project Rationale and Goals

As the E&P Industry moves to adopt integrated, asset based organizational structures they have increasingly put demands on suppliers, to provide tools that support team collaboration. The term Shared Earth Model (SEM) has emerged to describe an earth model (or set of models) that can be used simultaneously by all the asset team members in a collaborative environment. "Shared" refers to the fact that common information is used throughout the E&P decision support system. This includes sharing across G&G domains as well as between companies or vendor product lines. "Earth model" refers to the fact that our goal is to understand 3-D volumes that are petroleum reservoirs. Spatially oriented interfaces along with capabilities to visualize many different types of data are fundamental aspects of a SEM. Such a model will be derived from E&P workflows, not individual disciplines. A SEM should cut across the islands of integration as depicted on the figure below.

• supports a quantitative model based approach to business decision making
• enables backwards optimization loops
• does not require planners to know the whole system, just where their part fits
• enables applications to function as one complex system with replaceable parts

The SEM allows team members to work within their own area of expertise while ensuring that key information is made available to everyone in an expedient and timely manner.

Over the years, the development of earth models within the E&P Industry has advanced in a largely uncoordinated fashion. This has resulted in each functional area managing its own data acquisition programs and evolving its own models of the subsurface using discipline specific analysis tools and techniques. More often than not, the results of one group's analysis are produced in a representation or format that others cannot readily use. For example, significant interoperability barriers exist between the models used to characterize the static properties of a reservoir and the models used to simulate its dynamic behavior.

These inter-disciplinary miscommunications severely limit the utility of earth models as tools for technical and commercial decision support, risk evaluation and auditing. The interpretations made and conclusions drawn during one phase of subsurface analysis are difficult to propagate to subsequent phases, and furthermore, it is often impractical to rework established models to correct misinterpretations discovered in the light of newly emerging empirical data. This results in business problems that recur throughout the asset lifecycle; gross uncertainties associated with investment decisions in the early and formative years of license acquisition and field development; and sub-optimal field management throughout the producing life of the asset.

POSC specifications have helped create a shared understanding and representation of E&P data, but this, in itself, does not provide a solution for plug and play interoperability between the software tools used to develop complete earth models. In general, these software tools are built for commercially available platforms that are based on proprietary embedded technologies and interfaces. These platforms do not provide adequate levels of interoperability, either between the proprietary application components provided by the platform vendor, or between these proprietary components and the third party tools that provide the additional functionality needed by asset teams. This often results in oil companies embarking on costly in-house development to solve specific integration issues. However, much of this investment still does not address the primary issue of how to support effective team collaboration between asset team members.

A number of Industry initiatives have emerged to tackle aspects of the Shared Earth Model problem. For example, URGENT has focused on identifying the requirements of a Shared Earth Model from the perspective of the needs of emerging E&P business processes. RESCUE has defined and published specifications for C++ structures for key earth model data types to enable characterization and simulation applications to exchange data. The OMEGA-2 Project has developed specifications for earth model business objects. The gOcad Consortium continues with its work to improve the openness and utility of its modeling tools. The OpenSpirit Alliance has launched an initiative to identify an architectural partitioning between earth model objects and their discrete topological representations and to provide a set of standard interfaces to access and manipulate these representations.

It is widely accepted by those directly involved that the realization of the full Shared Earth Model concept is a non-trivial undertaking, and one, in today's economic climate, that should be tackled by the E&P Industry as a whole. And yet, despite the pressing business urgency, the industry lacks a clear and universally accepted definition of what a Shared Earth Model is, or what it should do. Furthermore, efforts to realize its implementation are being hampered by the absence of a recognized Industry voice providing leadership, and a recognized Industry platform providing facilitation and encouraging collaboration. It is in this light that POSC has established the SEM Project with the goals to:

• achieve Industry consensus on a set of SEM concepts that supports the core requirements for more effective team collaboration throughout the asset lifecycle
• facilitate and leverage Industry collaboration to expedite the identification, development and implementation of successive generations of Shared Earth Model solutions
• identify best practices for business processes supported by a SEM
• stimulate a diverse range of Industry-wide activities, including both enhancements to POSC specifications and implementation projects.

POSC intends to achieve the overall project goals by conducting subprojects in phases. Phase 1 will begin in 1998 and run through mid-1999. Phase 2 is anticipated to begin immediately following Phase 1 and run through the end of 1999.

Value for the Industry

• Bring structure, methodology and consistency to bear on the problem
• Apply industry skills and knowledge to understand issues and realize SEM concepts
• Understand and prioritize patterns of usage that the SEM must support, including requirements for collaboration among team members working at the same site and with other parties around the globe.
• Reduce implementation lead-time for SEM component technologies

Value for Oil Companies

• Guide vision and focus efforts in a unified direction
• Synthesize disparate Industry initiatives
• Drive standardization through collaboration on requirements and solutions
• Share software and standards development costs and risk
• Steer and facilitate development of enhanced analysis and interpretive tools.

Business Value to IT Suppliers

• Understand the strategic business drivers for SEM and its market potential
• Share the cost of development of architectural specifications for SEM
• Incorporate identified SEM "quick wins" into product and service plans and refine longer term product strategy
• Access sources of Industry funding for early solutions
• Access wider markets through platform standardization and open architecture.

Overview Presentation

E&P Shared Earth Model, Dan Schenck, Business Unit Manager, POSC Presented at: Information Technology in Oil & Gas E&P Conference, Houston, Texas, December 1, 1998
[HTML presentation]	[Zipped MS PowerPoint file - 267 KB]

Contract/Project Plan

• SEM Overview Presentation
• SEM Contract (Word 97 file, 103KB) which includes a detailed description of the project work plan.

Contact Information

Project Manager:	Dan Schenck
Phone:	+1-713-267-5166
Email:	schenck@posc.org

Register Your Interest

• Interested in being a project proponent
• Interested in being a project sponsor
• Interested in being a project participant
• Interested in monitoring the project to a successful completion