The Preservation of Geoscience Data Committee (PGDC) was
formed to facilitate discussion about preserving geoscience data
accumulated through oil and gas exploration and production.
Companies spend millions of dollars commissioning, purchasing
and accumulating data during the exploration and production cycle,
but for various reasons then commonly have trouble spending a
small fraction of that cost preserving and maintaining this data. In
difficult times companies seeking to reduce costs will look to their
data repositories where the cores, cuttings, paper, film and digital
archives are stored and try to reduce costs. Paper and film can be
scanned, digital data re-mastered onto higher capacity storage
media, but there is little that can be done to reduce the space
required for cores, cuttings and other physical samples. Gifts of
these collections to universities, geological surveys and societies,
and federal repositories, merely shift the burden of storage and
management to organisations already under intense financial
pressure and limited space.
To highlight the benefits and challenges of storing and maintaining
data and to help celebrate AAPG’s 100th Anniversary, the PGDC
has organised a display at this year’s AAPG ACE Convention to
demonstrate a range of core material and data/media taken from
the last 100 years of oil and gas exploration.
Cores
The PGDC core display organised by committee member Beverly
Blakeney DeJarnett, has been arranged specifically to demonstrate
cores representing the many and varied reservoir types (including
continental and marine sandstones, carbonates, tar sands, and oil
“shales”) represent some of the major oil and gas discoveries over
the last 70 years. Such a historically impressive and educational
array of samples would not be possible without the dedication and
commitment of organisations that preserve and maintain these
collections for posterity. Only by being able to study and learn from
these analogues from the past can we hope to understand and
predict where the reservoirs of the future will be.
Data/Media
Over the last 100 years the way in which data has been collected,
displayed and stored has changed dramatically. Early hand-written
lithology logs and strip logs have given way to an ever-increasing
variety of tools and techniques for measuring and visualising the
rocks in the subsurface. Analog methods of recording wireline,
seismic and other remote sensing tools gave way to digital and the
resulting explosion in data volumes. This, in turn, has led to a demand
for greater storage capacity media as more sophisticated techniques
led to MBs, GBs, TBs and even PBs of data being generated for a
single seismic survey. Today we are familiar with memory sticks
holding GBs of data but only 30 years ago the launch of the CD-ROM
holding a mere 650Mbs astonished the world where floppy disks and
cumbersome magnetic tapes and cartridges were all there were. The
bewildering array of innovative solutions resulted in an entire industry
bent of transferring data from one media to another to reduce space
but also to keep abreast of changing technology. Who amongst us still
has a 9-track tape drive which was once as common in the workplace
as a DVD drive is today.
The display the PGDC presents demonstrates to a new and
unfamiliar generation how things used to be and what limitations
geoscientists faced