The Pilot Story

During the last three years, I have been teaching a graduate level class on subsurface mapping and petroleum workstations. The main objective of the class is to familiarize students with the use of petroleum workstations for subsurface mapping of stratigraphic and structural features. Fifty percent of the grade goes into a final project in which students have to work with a real subsurface database (seismic and wells) to generate and rank exploration prospects. It is like a game, at least for me! At the end of the semester I invite outside experts to play the role of upper management while the students present their projects. Good exposure and a good experience for them. After several years of doing this I have come to the “painful” realization that sometimes my students just hate me! Why? It is a simple thing: Scales! If your map does not have a color scale, then I will deduct points from your lab (well the TA will under my iron rule!). If the cross section is not properly referenced on a map, then I will deduct points from your lab. If your scales do not have units, then you can be absolutely sure I will deduct a whole lot of points from your lab. I am bad, very bad…I know!

In an effort to highlight to my students the importance of scales, I recite every fall a story that made an impact on me the first time I heard it. It was around the year 2001 and I was a new geologist on a training program in PDVSA (National Oil Company of Venezuela). We were on a meeting on the Caracas office (Chuao) and I think it was Dr. Rodulfo Prieto (UT alumni) who was addressing the crowd. It was around 2:00 pm, after lunch and I have to confess that the “donkey hour” was taking a toll on a bunch of probably already hangover youngsters (those days when my liver was better suited for those late nights in Cubo Negro or El Leon!). I do not exactly remember the words but Rodulfo asked us something like: “Do you know what geoscientists have in common with airplane pilots?” We obviously looked clueless while he was starting to enjoy the plot. These are some of the “facts”:

1 Civilian passenger jets cruise between 30,000 to 39,000 feet (9144 – 11887.2 m for those of you that are trustful supporters of the metric system!)

2 Wells in the Gulf of Mexico can be drilled under water depths that can be greater than 6,000 feet (1828.8 m). Reservoir levels (targets!) can be located at subsea depths that are close to 25,000 feet (7620 m). The total distance between sea level and the reservoir can be close to 31,000 feet (9448.8 m). Well casings at these depths are variable but they can be close to 7 inches (17.78 cm).

If you are not impressed by that…you better stop reading now because you won’t find anything more engaging than that in this post. After talking about this in class (always the first meeting of the semester), I tell my students that geologists, and the engineers drilling the wells, are sometimes like pilots trying to hit a house with a straw while flying a plane at 31,000 feet of altitude. Well, maybe the straw is a bit of a stretch. Then, I can see a couple of incredulous looks here and there, a couple of wide eyes opening on the front row and then every time, a hand rises with a comment “…but the plane is moving, the well site is not!” This is my favorite because then I ask if they think the water column in the Gulf of Mexico (@6,000’) is a pool of still water and if they haven’t heard about something call storms and hurricanes? Scales are a difficult thing to grasp and my students are not the only ones to succumb to the temptation of presenting a colorful map without scales, peer-review publications and presentations from pros are plague with those as well! However, a cross-section without vertical and horizontal scales is meaningless and in my class you get heavily penalized by presenting such abominations. I do not expect students to learn all I try to teach in one semester, and equally I do not think I am the best of teachers BUT they will get the scales right! Hate involved or not…

Just to end: “In 1982, a successful oil finder from Midland Texas, admitted to not using geologists because when his competitors hired them, all it did was increase their cost per barrel of oil found” (from Selley, 1998)