Business news for the week of 16 November 2009 News section front
Past news briefs
Seismic crew survey reports State geological surveys to play key role in geothermal energy search
13 November 2009—US Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu announced awards totaling US$338 million for geothermal energy across the country, including the population of a comprehensive nationwide geothermal resource data system by the nation's state geological surveys to help identify and assess new fields. The Association of American State Geologists (AASG) organized a coalition of 40 state geological surveys to populate a new National Geothermal Data System with relevant state-specific geothermal data. The project will receive $17.79 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) over three years. AASG is already a partner in the Geothermal Data Coalition, based at Boise State University to design and build the National Geothermal Data System under contract to the DOE. AASG member surveys will adapt the Geoscience Information Network (GIN) to provide data discovery, access, and exchange services as a component in the developing data system. Other components include a data repository, software applications, vocabularies, data content, network communications, and web portals. GIN is collaboration between AASG and the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) to integrate geological survey databases using web services and open source standards in a distributed system. The Arizona Geological Survey is the designated lead agency in building GIN for the nation's geological surveys and will manage the DOE-funded effort to populate the NGDS. The project includes the USGS, Microsoft Research, and the petroleum industry consortium, Energistics, as partners. All of the dozens of other geothermal projects announced are expected to integrate their data into the NGDS. Fairfield Industries announces sale of Z700 Node System to SEVMORGEO
9 November 2009—Fairfield Industries announced that SEVMORGEO State Company in Russia has purchased a Z700 nodal seismic data acquisition system designed and manufactured by Fairfield to operate in shallow water at depths between 1–700 m. St. Petersburg-based SEVMORGEO purchased 500 of the Z700 system’s completely cable-free Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs), or nodes. SEVMORGEO plans to begin operations using Z700 in the summer shooting season in 2010. Schlumberger signs exclusive agreement with Rock Deformation Research
15 November 2009—Schlumberger announced an agreement with Rock Deformation Research Limited (RDR) to provide the RDR structural analysis module within the Petrel seismic-to-simulation workflow. The new RDR module enables comprehensive analysis of seal and trap, two of the key risks in an exploration play or prospect. Together with the PetroMod Petroleum Systems module’s source, migration and seal analysis capability, Petrel now gives explorationists a unique environment to reduce all the key risks associated with exploration. The new module includes fault juxtaposition and property mapping capabilities—such as permeability prediction, clay mixing, and smearing algorithms—delivering critical tools for development and production environments. This further extends the Petrel workflow to correctly model faults and characterize reservoir compartmentalization to achieve an accurate history match and correctly predict reservoir performance. This module will be available for Petrel 2010 and will be exclusively sold and supported by SIS. COMSOL offers free cluster support for multiphysics simulations with windows HPC server
16 November 2009—COMSOL announced that with the upcoming release of COMSOL Multiphysics version 4.0 for Windows HPC Server 2008 (HPCS) current users of a COMSOL Multiphysics floating network license will have free and unlimited access to cluster compute power. The new COMSOL support for cluster computing means that any simulation job can now be deployed to any number of clustered computers at no additional cost to the user. Free support for cluster computing distinguishes COMSOL Multiphysics from other developers of simulation software who price their applications proportional to the number of computers and processors available to the user. EMGS agreement with Rocksource
18 November 2009—Electromagnetic Geoservices (EMGS) has entered into a data-licensing agreement with Rocksource, in which Rocksource precommitted to license newly acquired Clearplay Test EM data over a number of prospects in the Gulf of Mexico. This agreement will generate fourth quarter revenues in excess of US$2.5 million. EMGS and Rocksource are evaluating additional prospects to extend the program, including additional new acquisition as well as late sales of existing data library.
This new program to de-risk prospects in the Gulf of Mexico is an extension of the pre-existing relationships between FOCUS Exploration, Rocksource, and EMGS. | 
