A number of misconceptions have affected the efficiency and quality of acquired and interpreted data.
The first is that acquisition and interpretation companies are mainly service companies, that is, companies whose main objective is short-term client satisfaction. In fact they are product companies, whose deliverables are to be used for decades. The service company emphasis has led these companies to concentrate on the looks more than the contents.
The second is that the industry has reached a level of maturity such that all data products, resulting from acquisition and interpretation are commodity. Considering that the deliverables from the acquisition engineer or the log analyst depend much on him, on the company she is working for, on the software and hardware they use, which all create variability that creates confusion in large field studies, this statement needs some revision. Though, of course, normalization will fix everything!
The third area of confusion resides on who should check data. In the eighteenth century, the “caveat emptor” rule was in full blast. The salesman could be dishonest and the buyer had to know well the products he would purchase. Today, this position is not longer sustainable. Most modern products are extremely complicated and only the maker of the product knows it well enough to perform efficient checks. Oilfield data falls in this level of complexity and can only be thoroughly controlled by the producer.
Philippe retired from Schlumberger Oilfield Services at the end of March 2004. He received degrees in Engineering from École Centrale de Paris, in economics from Paris-Assas University and in Plasma Physics from Paris-Orsav University. He joined Schlumberger in 1972 after working for the French Atomic commission. After years as a field engineer, inline management, interpretation development and marketing, he has concentrated on the different aspects of quality. His is the author of the textbook Log Data Acquisition and Quality Control, published by Éditions Technip and available through Amazon. He has held several positions within SPWLA, including President. He is also an Associate Editor of Petrophysics and writes the column “Le Log”. He has also been the Vice-Chairman of the Log Characterization Consortium, co-chaired two Data Quality conferences (London, 1993 and Taos, 1998), and has written technical articles and booklets on high resolution logging, NMR logging and density logging.