Within the catacombs and backroom recesses of established oil and gas companies resides a wealth of information of preexisting well logs, old photos and geologists’ handwritten notes of years’ past. This is pen and paper stuff, actual maps and other documents. Somewhere in those dusty and stacked boxes lies forgotten treasure that could potentially help a new generation of geologists uncap greater sources of energy.
Much of it sits, collecting dust.
This is the ultimate scavenger hunt – even if nobody is quite sure what specifically is in those boxes or even, at times, what one might be looking for.
Still, it’s increasingly important these days, because, according to Bryan McDowell of Sabata Energy Consultants, “People are running out of inventory.”
He sees these repositories as undiscovered treasure troves.
McDowell, who is the company’s founder and managing partner, said the recent wave of mergers and acquisitions in the industry has raised the stakes of all this.
“The only way to really essentially drop costs and build inventories is to acquire somebody else’s,” he said.
To do that, the buyer needs to know what the seller knows – and the seller might not even know the extent of it.
Sabata, which calls itself a “one-stop shop for oil and gas data and data services,” collects old data, sorts through it, and then makes it available.
‘One Man’s Trash … ‘
“If I hear someone is going to donate something, I will literally hop on a plane. I fly usually straight out within a couple of days or a week to get boxes delivered and move it back to Midland (his home location) within a few days typically, before anybody knows what’s going on,” he explained.
Sometimes called “dark data,” the well logs and other data he finds was stored away because it either (a) wasn’t valuable (or relevant) any longer, especially during the shale revolution, or (b) because the generation that utilized these datasets are retired or no longer around to examine it.
McDowell likens what his company does to what famous chef Anthony Bourdain once surmised about why there always seems to be seafood stew or chowder or some kind of fish offshoot at restaurants early in the week – it’s from all the seafood that wasn’t used over the weekend.
“That’s what we’re doing. We’re getting all these little bitty acquisitions, whether it’s from public data, small privates, big privates, whatever. And they’re just giving us stuff and we take anything and everything that we’re given. And then we just cobble it all together, and then we’re making new data products from scratch,” he explained.
During the shale revolution, people needed the analog data to, as he said, “outline the play, but the relevance of the stuff has really fallen off in the last 15 years.”
There was a more practical reason that analog data started piling up.
“It’s a pain. It’s a lot of physical labor because not only do you have to have the physical part of it, you also have to have the expertise for the digital side too,” said McDowell.
This information, when anything happened with it at all, used to go to geologic libraries, but the libraries didn’t have the staff to cull through everything that was given them
And this is what Sabata provides for both buyers and sellers.
“We’re always trying to fill in those gaps,” he said, “because you almost never have enough logs of all these wells.”
‘ … Another Man’s Treasure’
Sabata, he said, has the largest directory of public and private-sourced geoscience data in the United States: more than 3 million records and counting.
As to that generation divide, it’s real.
“I know very few people under the age of 40 that have spent significant time in a library -- myself included – before buying our collection,” he said.
Digitalization not only makes it more accessible, but it doesn’t require expensive storage space. Companies are just happy to get rid of the stuff, which works out well for Sabata.
“We don’t buy data from anybody. We tell them we’re not going to pay for it, but we’ll come and box it up and then move it, which saves them a couple of thousand dollars in moving and storing expenses,” he said.
McDowell said his services include geologic mapping, decline curve analysis, well-interference testing, frac hit analysis, rate and pressure transient analysis and reservoir simulation. One of the byproducts of being able to access the compiled data is what may be uncovered.
Think about garage sales and finding treasures in books and cabinet drawers
“In a lot of exploration, frankly, you get a feeling there’s something in a specific area and you keep going into the data and hopefully find something that looks good,” he said.
But even when that doesn’t happen, McDowell said the pursuit might have been worth it because, in the end, you might invariably find something else.
“There may be something that looks pretty reasonable the more you keep falling down these rabbit trails.
And the trails can be pretty long and circuitous and take time to traverse,” he explained.
Finding that needle in the oil haystack takes some work.
“We just acquired this huge data set in New Mexico – probably 100,000 well logs. A lot of this stuff is conventional old reservoirs that been kind of drilled up already and people weren’t really going after,” McDowell related.
There were more than 2,300 boxes – or about 50,000 pounds of paper.
“We packed it by hand, loaded it and unloaded it. You should see the muscles I put on this past month,” he said.
Once the information is packed up and sent to Sabata’s headquarters and warehouse – actually once he packs it up – McDowell and his staff will update the company, if the company is interested, in what was uncovered.
At present, the company has more than 1 million well logs across the Permian, Rockies, mid-continent and the Gulf Coast.
Once he has the data, it is indexed, which, he said, sounds like a no-brainer, but most libraries don’t even have an index of what they own.
When a new company buys data from Sabata – companies can, however, see the indexes for free on such topics as well log inventories, gas analyses, sample photos, drill stem tests, formation tops to name just some – it gets a perpetual license, which means it’s theirs for as long as it wants, but can’t resell it or donate it to anybody else.
McDowell said the information he collects isn’t just about oil and gas information.
“There’s carbon sequestration in hydrogen, helium, geothermal, the orphan wells and lithium. This is stuff on the fringes of the basins … the stuff people throw away,” he said.
Data at Risk
This is not just one man’s or one company’s passion. The US Geological Survey, in a report entitled “Data at Risk: Expanding Legacy Data Inventory and Preservation Strategies,” stated, “USGS has produced more than a century of Earth science data, much of which is currently unavailable to the greater scientific community due to inaccessible or obsolescent media, formats and technology.” It went on to say that “tapping this vast wealth of ‘dark data’ requires 1) a complete inventory of legacy data and 2) methods and tools to effectively evaluate, prioritize and preserve the data with the greatest potential impact to society.”
McDowell wants to emphasize that the data he has will not uncover the next billion-dollar well.
“But there’s still some value to it and people need data. They can’t afford to get it from the big data vendors or it’s just too expensive. And a lot of times they don’t have the data expertise to do it on their own,” he said.
As for his company, its mission, and its value to data preservation and digitalization, he said, “We’re essentially the last stop for this data before the dumpster.”