Realistic assessment of the return on investment in the exploitation of natural resources projects comes from multidisciplinary assessments of information and data that must be collated and organized to permit valid statistical analysis. In the “classical” (since the 1980’s)Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) pyramid, data become a valuable commodity only when contextualized within the framework of a hypothesis. At this point, they “become” information. Information, so the theory goes, can be turned into Knowledge in an alchemical process defined by Rios (2004) as “the combination of data and information, to which is added expert opinion, skills, and experience, to result in a valuable asset which can be used to aid decision making. Knowledge may be explicit and/or tacit, individual and/or collective”.
The weak link in this chain of value creation is that the contextual frameworks within which the “experts” work have a nasty habit of being upset by paradigm shifts driven by new data or new thinking. A good example of the latter phenomenon was the revitalization of the Norwegian North Sea creaming curve (discovery volume data contextualized by time) by the exploration team at Lundin Petroleum who re-thought the migration paths of petroleum out of the rift and drilled the discovery well of the multibillion-barrel Johan Sverdrup field.
The Maracaibo Lake creaming curve in Venezuela is indicative of a highly mature basin, which conventionally would be interpreted to imply little opportunity for major new discoveries. The question asked by the U3 Explore Team at the outset of our work in Venezuela was, “Is there a new way of looking at the information from which the curve is constructed that could generate a paradigm shift that would identify new opportunities?”
The knowledge used to construct that curve has been generated over a period of more than a hundred years of evolving methods of data gathering, preservation, and analysis. These activities generated many thousands of paper reports, books, bulletins, and maps, representing the “wisdom at the time of the analysis,” which were often available only in Spanish and stored locally in libraries with very little contextual information to bind them together. Furthermore, data collection and aggregation were often driven by the administrative needs of taxation and accounting, with the result that the historical contextual framework within which discovery and production data were organized was a mix of geologic and administrative constraints. Thus, producing fields were often artificially truncated at lease boundaries, with production allocated to individual flow units within those areas, so “true” volumetrics were seldom fully accounted for. The loss of institutional knowledge in the past two decades of political uncertainty has exacerbated the problems of collating and understanding scattered information to support the improvements in production and renewal of exploration.
The team at U3Explore has worked to digitize and preserve critical elements of the evolution of historical knowledge to upgrade our ability to analyze the regional variability and complexity of Venezuelan geology. Specifically, the team has combined a framework and geoanalytics, which we term the U3DVenezuela, to provide a new geological context for analyzing this diverse historical dataset split between independent research initiatives conducted over the years. Our approach was to reverse the DIKW Pyramid, deploying the wisdom and knowledge of a group of experts in petroleum geology with a track record as oil finders in Venezuela to re-contextualize relationships between scattered information sources, placing them into a geological framework that may be used to support life-of-field extensions for existing producing properties and for generating new opportunities through play-based exploration in Venezuela.
The methodology employed was to digitize and contextualize all the reference material available to us, to place it into a play-based relational framework that may be used to develop a statistically valid understanding of the petroleum habitat in the different basins across the country. At the most fundamental information organization level, thousands of described individual flow units were analyzed and grouped by stratigraphic age and depositional environment system utilizing the schema of the Venezuelan Lexicon of Formations, published in 1997 by the Geological Society of Venezuela. This allowed flow-units to be re-categorized into coherent reservoirs (in context of Venezuela- Formations)with associated production volume and phase attributes. These Reservoirs are then contextualized within the database into Producing Fields.
The database is built on the framework and search logic of the “Cossey and Associates Deepwater Database,” a proven analytical tool in deep water exploration used in the industry over a period of several decades, that has been upgraded into a web application and rebranded as “U3D”.
Placing both legacy and new information in a “new” context of reservoirs is certainly a valuable tool to help optimize ultimate recovery in mature fields, but it is also key to review exploratory models and create new ones, including visualization of new plays, in a geologically complex and mature basin. Such would be the case of the Maracaibo basin in Venezuela, one example being the La Paz field, where three different plays, Tertiary Classics, Cretaceous Carbonates, and Crystalline Fractured Basement, were proven commercial in three different decades. A few additional examples in the same basin would be a stratigraphic play near the Mara West structure (Marquez 1996, Arminio et al., 1997) and a new porosity model for Cretaceous dolomites in Urdaneta West (Poppelreiter et al., 2005).
The power of the U3D analysis system is further enhanced by placing all geologically defined Field and Basin outlines into a geospatial context using the ArcGIS portal. This allows information aggregation in the historical administrative context as well as placing all the identified fields and play fairway elements into the context of Petroleum Provinces defined by depositional and tectonic frameworks.
Significant upside exists across Venezuela by applying a Petroleum Systems-based logic, especially looking for upside potential in those basins previously considered “mature”. U3D Venezuela provides a framework by which information required for the development of the natural resources of Venezuela may be contextualized to generate new insights to make well-founded investment decisions.
References:
Arminio J.F., J. Figuera and T. Mata (1997): Reexploración: un nuevo proceso en el negocio aguas arriba. Resultados en la Cuenca de Maracaibo. Memorias VIII Congreso Geológico Venezolano. Sociedad Venezolana de Geólogos V.1 p. 15-20
Datacamp (2023): The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Pyramid. The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) pyramid illustrates the progression of raw data to valuable insights. https://www.datacamp.com/cheat-sheet/the-data-information-knowledge-wisdom-pyramid
Kronman, G. E., Rushworth, S. W., Jagiello, K., and Aleman, A., 1995, Oil and gas discoveries and basin resource predictions in Latin America, in A. J. Tankard, R. Suárez S., andH. J. Welsink, Petroleum basins of South America: AAPG Memoir 62, p. 53—61.
Poppelreiter M., M.A. Balzarini, P. De Sousa, S. Engel, M. Galarraga, B. Hansen, X. Marquez, J. Morell, R. Nelson and F. Rodriguez (2005): Structural Control on sweet-spot distribution in a carbonate reservoir: concepts and 3-D models (Cogollo Group, Lower Cretaceous, Venezuela). AAPG Bulletin v.89 No. 12 (December 2005) p. 1651-1676
Rios, M., 2004: European Guide to good Practice in Knowledge Management -Part 1: Knowledge Management Framework. European Committee for Standardization Workshop Agreement 14924-1:2004
