Friday, January 10, 2014

3DSE Jan 2014

3D Seismic Exploration class

The class finished this morning with 18 prospect presentations.  In just one week the students got up to speed from basically no knowledge of 3D seismic interpretation, IHS/Kingdom software, or prospect generation. It was intense (8 hours per day) with hard deadlines that required serious time management. After all prospects are presented, a hidden ballot decides the top 3, then a runoff vote.  Top 3 prospectors were Michael Kumbalek, Matthew Cope, and Brock Langford.  The runoff came up tied between Kumbalek and Cope, so a roll of the dice decided the issue.  Best Prospect winner Michael Kumbalek received a copy of 52 Things You Should Know About Geophysics, inscribed by the instructor.  Mr. Kumbalek is on a roll, he also won best presentation in my petroleum geophysics class in fall semester 2013!

Top overall score in 3DSE was Daniel Otto.

Special thanks to Steve Milligan for serving as external advisor, IHS for donation of Kingdom licences, and FairfieldNodal (John Smythe) for providing 3D seismic prospect data in the Vermillion area of the Gulf of Mexico.

University of Arkansas 2014 January Intercession 3D seismic exploration class.
Instructor wearing tie-die .

Best Prospect winner Michael Kumbalek (right) with award standing in front of the title slide of his Mad Dog prospect., along with runner up Matthew Cope (left) and instructor Chris Liner (center). Too bad the photo is fuzzy...

Crunch Time 1/10/2014

It's early in the new year and I am nearly finished with my first class at the University of Arkansas. The course is 3-D seismic exploration taught over 10 days in January, something called the January intercession. We have three projects, the third of which is a prospect generation exercise using a Fairfield-Nodal 3-D seismic survey in the Gulf of Mexico. Today was the deadline to finish the PowerPoint for the project. It's a hard deadline at 5 PM. The picture below shows the situation a few minutes before deadline. Glad to say all 18 students got the project in on time, presentations are tomorrow morning eight to noon.

Nothing like pushing back the frontiers of ignorance, one student at a time.


If there is a benefit to coming in at 8 AM in the middle of January, it is occasionally to capture a picture like the one below. Enjoy.