Once called “the Arabia of Latin America,” Venezuela has long been known for its immense oil and gas reserves and exploration and production potential. The mass exodus of petroleum industry professionals and a turbulent political environment during the Chavez and Maduro regimes over the past two decades have left some companies hesitant to invest and operate in the country.
Recent discoveries in neighboring Guyana and relaxed sanctions from the Biden administration have reignited interest and encouraged U.S.-based companies and others to reconsider investment in Venezuela.
With limited outside industry presence, few digital publications and a lack of new presentations at technical conferences, finding and trusting the information is a challenge.
In 2020, a group of oil and gas industry experts, including several Venezuelans with deep knowledge of local geology, set out to fill the information gap and design new technology to enable advanced integrated analysis of critical information for investment decisions in Venezuela’s hydrocarbon and other energies.
Discussions led to the formation of U3 Explore, a consortium of technical experts who collaborate on cross-functional work and integrative thinking. The multidisciplinary team includes senior geoscientists, GIS specialists, professional and innovative digital solutions designers and career E&P database creators.
The U3 Explore Venezuela Project
More recently, the U3 Explore group launched U3 Explore Venezuela, a project to compile and analyze geological data collected by industry and academia to build a comprehensive knowledge repository using contemporary concepts and technologies. The end goal is an analytical foundation for natural resource development projects.
U3Ven is hosted by the U3Explore.com platform, the product of a partnership between Actus Veritas Geoscience, LLC, an energy sector technical and economic consulting firm, and code t3, a technology company that develops and deploys cloud-native applications to enable information and data collection, validation and analysis.
The project is designed to cover all Venezuelan oil and gas basins, starting with the top two most prolific – Maracaibo and Eastern Venezuela – with plans to expand later to include the rest of the country.
Katya Casey, U3 Explore founder and CEO and managing director with Actus Veritas Geoscience, described U3Ven as an ambitious but worthwhile project.
“The Venezuelan basins are prolific and have a long E&P history since the 1910s, during which geologic understanding evolved. Most of the insights were peer-reviewed for local periodicals and books,” she said. “National congresses, local periodicals, continental symposiums and international conventions became a preferred outlet for prolific insights, avoiding time-consuming and more formal editorial processes of global specialized organizations.”
While some publications were created digitally, most were preserved in their original print format, creating the need for a standardized, searchable database accessible to researchers and potential investors.
“Our goal is to prepare and condition these layers of information of proven quality and consistency for modern digital tools, including contextual search, to facilitate analysis and inform business decisions,” Casey said.
Multidisciplinary Team
Venezuelan native Marel Sanchez, co-founder and managing director of both U3 Explore and Actus Veritas Geoscience, is U3Ven’s visionary and strategy designer.
“The wealth of information created over the last 30-plus years remained dispersed in mostly analog publications. It is not readily available for research and projects and is vulnerable to destruction,” she said. “We identified an urgent need to preserve the knowledge essential to the country’s economic rejuvenation and growth. Fortunately, modern technology facilitates knowledge preservation, retrieval and rapid analysis.”
In 2020 and ‘21 Sánchez organized a series of workshops with Venezuelan industry veterans who had accumulated books, personal records, manuscripts, presentations, published research papers, personal outcrop description collections, photographs and field experiences that could contribute to a searchable digital library ready for information mining.
“Our goal was in making the knowledge of more than 100 years of geological studies of Venezuela’s natural resources available for educated business decisions,” Sánchez said.
Analytical Platform
The project expanded in 2022 when deepwater specialist Steven Cossey joined the U3 Explore team.
Cossey brought along his Deepwater Turbidite Database, an extensive field analog database with searchable properties for turbidite reservoirs and corresponding depositional settings. The rebranded and updated format, available through U3 Explore’s database branch U3D, uses a new version of the software to provide an enhanced search interface and new analytics options.
Sánchez described how adding Cossey´s methodology, outcrop support and basin-level knowledge to existing U3D products led to the development of extensive field analog database for turbidite reservoirs and corresponding depositional settings with more than 120 parameters.
The integration connects published reference material, field, reservoir, basin information and GIS maps for basins and oil fields not only in Venezuela, but also around the world.
“This is our first step into a deep-rooted digital transformation,” Sanchez said. “Our goal is to integrate basin and asset characterization with available surface and subsurface information to facilitate informed decisions, conduct cost-benefit analyses, and ultimately reduce uncertainty in investment and operational costs.”
The Journey from Print to Digital
Juan Fransico Arminio, senior geoscience adviser at U3 Explore and associate professor at Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela, described one of the greatest challenges for the U3Ven project, combining disparate printed materials into a congruent digital format. A perfect example was the collection of memoirs from the Congreso Geólogico Venezolano (Venezuelan Geological Congress), published by the Venezuelan Geological Society from 1959 to 1997.
“Geoscientists, institutions and libraries collected the memoirs, yet, over the years, the collections became bulky, sometimes discarded, and often spread to people’s houses and garages in Venezuela and many other countries; books got lost or damaged,” Arminio said. “Because of this, it became increasingly harder to find the information important to be preserved for future natural resources development projects. Everyone had or used to have a part of the collection, but not the complete collection.”
Venezuelan Geological Congress
Considering the tremendous value that the Congreso Geológico Memoirs represented for the project, Arminio and his team set out to locate and digitalize the complete collection.
“We decided to locate and digitize the whole collection of memoirs – ‘Project Congreso Geológico’ – if you will,” he said, “but delivering the project was easier said than done.”
The team spent months searching for someone who had the whole collection and, finally, they located the collector, Orlando Méndez, a well-known geologist, researcher and speaker living in Venezuela.
“Professor Méndez has a spectacular knowledge of Venezuelan geology and its oil industry and a complete collection of printed Congreso Geológico in his studio in Caracas,” Arminio said. “He graciously agreed to share his collection for digitization. The process may look simple at first, but page, format and volume size vary from one congress to the next. The books had to be disassembled, and every scan quality controlled.”
After scanning all the pages into portable digital format and in image format, the team compiled the volume digitally to ensure correct organization. They also reassembled the original physical volume with new covers, ensuring quality control and preparing it for delivery.
Arminio and his team scanned and organized 26 volumes from six congresses (III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIIII). The collection has more than 15,000 pages and integrates hard-copy formats of differing sizes, as well as maps and cross-sections of varying quality, precision and scale.
“The whole process took 18 months, time, energy and money but it all was worthwhile,” Arminio said. “The Congreso Geológico is now free from its physical trap and ready to be shared through digital channels.”
The U3 Explore team completed the digital collection in April 2024. In May 2024, they delivered the digital collection to the Venezuelan Geological Society and donated both the physical collection and a digital copy to the Universidad Central de Venezuela library.
Reducing Risk and Informing Decisions
Casey noted that, while U3Ven provides benefits to historians and academics, the project’s primary goal is developing a framework for informed business decisions.
“Organizations investing in exploiting natural resources know the value of well-organized information,” she said. “Historical production records, published descriptions of reservoir properties and solutions to the regional operational challenges are just a few examples of how the local knowledge of experts can lead to optimized recovery, identification of asset´s upside potential, identification of geohazards, and prevention of the operational accidents.”
Organizing subsurface information for modern analytical tools with local expertise in geology and petroleum industry is just the first phase of a larger U3 Explore Venezuela project, the goal of which is to reduce the risks in foreign direct investment into the Venezuelan energy sector.
Project Phases
The first phase of the project, completed in early 2023, involved revisiting the basin and field geologic boundaries, aggregating play and field information available from different sources and normalizing and building a system for exposing layers of the information published over the decades for modern integrated analysis.
The second phase, completed in January 2024, incorporated detailed basin and petroleum systems description with a focus on an exploratory analysis of the remaining potential in the mature Maracaibo basin.
The work continues with a detailed analysis of basin boundaries, fields, petroleum systems descriptions and an upside potential assessment of all Venezuelan basins.
Future project phases will cover legal, commercial and environmental aspects. Sánchez, who currently works with U3 Explore’s decarbonization projects, noted that the U3Ven project work has applications beyond oil and gas.
“An understanding of the trapping conditions and reservoir information also are needed for decarbonization projects, including subsurface carbon storage and carbon-related enhanced oil recovery in mature oil and gas fields,” she said.
U3 Explore Venezuela is hosted in Houston, Texas, and is accessible worldwide for collaboration.
To access the U3Ven database or to contribute to the project, contact Katya Casey, [email protected], and Marel Sánchez, [email protected].