A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

  A picture is worth a thousand words, and there is no industry that benefits from visual presentation of information more than the petroleum industry. Since we can’t exactly see hundreds of meters below the surface of the earth we try to create pictures that most accurately reflect what’s happening down there. The resource that we have at our disposal is information, lots of it- with both the proprietary information that companies collect and public data (more than 770,000 wells in the WCSB).

But how companies use this information varies significantly. “Leading companies are doing more than just collecting and storing information in large quantities. They’re now building competitive strategies around data-driven insights that are, in turn, generating impressive business results. Their secret weapon? Analytics.”  (from the book Competing On Analytics<http://www.tomdavenport.com/books.html#coa> by Davenport and Harris). Companies can be ranked on there use of information from level 1 to level 4 in terms of “Analytic Maturity”.

>>>>>>> 1)      Collect & store data

>>>>>>> 2)      Reporting (past focused … what did we do)

>>>>>>> 3)      Use Analytics to make better decisions & garner insights

>>>>>>> 4)      Build a strategic/competitive advantage using analytics

The visual analysis tools that are available to advance a company’s analytic maturity include geospatial mapping tools, 3D models and a myriad of charts and graphs. One tool that is distinguishing itself in Calgary as a leading oil & gas data exploration & analytics tool is VISAGE<http://www.visageinfo.com/>. So in the coming weeks we will be putting VISAGE though its paces. We’ve connected VISAGE to public data at the gDC<http://www.geologic.com/solutions/data/index.htm> and will be presenting a series of blog postings exploring & analyzing production in the WCSB. We will be exploring plays, provincial production trends, type curves, cumulative probability distributions and generally presenting you with a variety of visual treats. We would like this to also be as informative as possible, so we would like to know what you would like to see. Simply comment on this blog to make a visualization request…

To whet your appetite (click on the image to view a larger version);

Here you can see the biggest players in gas and follow production rates allong with the drop in prices. More recently, release of gas from gas storage has increased production.

This one shows total Oil History split by province, looks like SK is taking over!

Here is a chart of 310,961 wells showing you the history of Oil production in Alberta from 1962 to present day. The data is grouped by on production year (i.e. each coloured band is the production from wells that came on production in a particular year)