Business news for the week of 12 April 2010News section front
Past news briefs
Seismic crew survey reports EMGS awarded contract worth US $7.5 million 8 April 2010—Electromagnetic Geoservices ASA (EMGS) was awarded a contract worth US $7.5 million to provide 3D electromagnetic (EM) data acquisition, processing, and interpretation services for a repeat customer. The survey is expected to commence in the third quarter of 2010, subject to vessel availability. This is the second part of a global 3D EM campaign for a major oil company, the first part of which was a Caribbean contract announced in mid-December. Schlumberger acquires IGEOSS 8 April 2010—Schlumberger acquired IGEOSS, a developer of structural geology software. The IGEOSS applications will be integrated with existing Schlumberger software. This acquisition continues the SIS strategy to invest in core technologies to enhance modeling of challenging environments. The IGEOSS capabilities will be embedded in the Petrel software to help geoscientists better understand fractured reservoirs and the impact of stress regimes over time, particularly in subsalt, compressional, and shale gas plays. Ikon Science and ARKeX join forces to develop technology and services 12 April 2010—Ikon Science and ARKeX have signed a cooperation agreement to facilitate the development and promotion of joint technology, services and studies that will help derisk complex exploration plays. The new service is an integrated modeling workflow using full tensor gravity gradiometry (FTG) data, well information, and 2D/3D seismic data in conjunction with Ikon Science’s rock physics technologies and reservoir characterisation workflows. The result will be an integrated 3D geological model with structure, stratigraphy, and rock properties over target areas. EnergyIQ 2.0 EIQ Loader: New use of OpenSpirit Integration Framework 12 April 2010—EnergyIQ released its OpenSpirit-enabled EIQ Loader 2.0, allowing oil companies to read data from the IHS EnerdeqML Domestic data feed, and write it to any OpenSpirit-enabled data store. EnergyIQ joined the OpenSpirit Partner Program in October 2009. OpenSpirit connectivity extends EIQ Loader beyond PPDM to include other industry databases such as KINGDOM, OpenWorks, Petra, GeoFrame, Finder, and Recall allowing oil companies to more easily keep vendor data current in their project database of choice. Mike Bacon joins Ikon science 12 April 2010—Mike Bacon has joined Ikon Science as principal geoscientist. Bacon previously worked at Shell and more recently Petro-Canada. His extensive background in seismic interpretation includes 10 years as leader of a seismic special studies team for Shell, and a broad spread of international seismic interpretation. He is the lead author of 3D Seismic Interpretation (with Rob Simm and Terry Redshaw). He was awarded Honorary Membership of the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers in 2009, and has been a member of the First Break Editorial Board over a long period. Bacon continues to be an active member of the wider geoscience community, serving on the Petroleum Geoscience Editorial board. He is based at Ikon's West London headquarters in Teddington. Paradigm maximizes SKUA performance on Intel platforms 12 April 2010—Paradigm announced the result of its technological collaboration with Intel Corporation. The two companies jointly worked on the integration of the optimized linear algebra routines from Intel MKL into the latest version of Paradigm SKUA 2009, enabling the software to take advantage of the Intel multicore processor architecture. This resulted in optimizing the computation time of the matrix inversion step used inside the construction of a SKUA model by a factor of up to 50. The collaboration with Intel enabled Paradigm to benchmark the Intel X25E solid state disk versus a traditional hard disk drive for out-of-core models. It reveals that solid state disk usage increases the speed by an additional 1.4 times in overall computing time. These two combined speedups enhance the performance of SKUA 2009 by nearly two orders of magnitude, allowing customers to work on higher-resolution models. | 
