Data In The Desert

When trying to find some bubblin' crude, it's not just a matter of shootin' at some food like Jed Clampett, the Beverly Hillbilly himself, did back in 1962. It's a science. Oil companies hunt in fields, deserts, jungles, and the sea for the oil and gas on which we all depend. Often, seismic acquisition firms trigger small explosions to measure the way sound waves travel through the layers of the earth. With equipment like computer recording stations, satellites, and geophones and hydrophones (relatively simple instruments that measure the movement of the earth) geophysicists can analyze 2-D, 3-D, and even 4-D images of the earth's subsurface. When they finally drill down, they're quite certain it's going to be worth the effort.

The success rate, thanks to new exploration technologies, has exploded over the past 20 years. The Child family has been in the oil and gas business since 1979. Dave and Jacqueline Child started their business as a manufacturer's representative in Houston. In 1987, they created Cypress Technologies (Leander, TX) to ruggedize products for their customers. "We take off-the-shelf products and beef them up. For example, we build enclosures around them so they can survive in oil and gas environments," said Greg Child, vice president, and son of the company's founders. Cypress Technologies is now a 26-employee corporation with $19.6 million in gross sales in 1998.

What's being bought and sold in the exploration and acquisition business isn't oil and gas; it's data. The cost of tape and hardware is miniscule in relation to the millions of dollars that the data on one single tape might be worth to an oil drilling company.

Clint McRee, Cypress Technologies' sales manager, said, "An oil company hires an exploration company to go to a remote location and look for oil. The oil company buys the data from the exploration company, and we sell tape drives and libraries to both the exploration and the oil companies."

The oil and gas industry uses tape cartridges (8 mm, 3480, and 3490), 9-track tapes, or DLT (digital linear tape) technology to record staggering amounts of data in real time. We're not just talking gigabytes here. Let's try terabytes and even petabytes. A petabyte equals roughly a quadrillion bytes. "When the data is acquired," said McRee, "it's usually done on an IBM standard drive, like an IBM 3490 or 3590. Then, it can be transcribed into other technologies, like DLT 8 mm; or it can stay in the original format."

The media carrying the data has to be relatively standard, so the people who need it can access it. It also needs to have longevity. Often, a well that has been idle for many years is reopened because new technology has made more acquisition possible. Geophysicists can refer to old tapes for a new starting point. For this reason, according to Greg Child, many tapes are guaranteed for 25, 50, even 100 years.

"Compatibility is important," added McRee. "Companies like to stay with IBM or ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standards. They want to be able to read those tapes in the future. A lot of data was recorded on 9-track tape in the past, so we still sell those drives. We maintain relationships with suppliers that offer outdated products that our customers still need."

Geophones and hydrophones are relatively inexpensive, but a single site may use thousands of them to send information to multi-line recording stations. These stations must be able to handle terabytes of data feeding in at lightning speeds, megabytes per second.

McRee noted, "Once the data is collected, it has to be processed. That's where the libraries come in. The data found during exploration is run through a third-party software package, and it processes the data so the oil companies can see what's down there. The data is loaded up in large libraries where the data can be accessed." Cypress Technologies sells Breece Hill's (Boulder, CO) Saguaro line of libraries.

For the past few decades, oil companies have largely depended on storage management companies to safeguard their seismic data and exploration records. In marine acquisition, these libraries can be permanent fixtures onboard a ship. Out in the fields, the data must be stored in smaller devices. Some companies send the data through satellite technology to a technician at a workstation.

Reducing Acquisition Time Saves Money For Both VARs And End Users
Greg Child says the best way to help a customer understand the return on investment is in terms of time saved. "We could get down to the cost per megabyte. Instead, you can look at where the customer was six months ago, what capacity was then, and what it is now. This way, you can measure growth rate. You can show the customer that it's feasible to purchase a faster system now, as well as have the same system a year or two from now. Customers want to know a product will have enough capacity to handle their needs."

"Oil and gas are easy to configure," Child continued. "Time equals money." Out in oil and gas fields, thousands of sensors (geophones) are placed over miles of ground. The ground is disrupted with vibrations or explosives. Geophysicists send sound waves down into the ground and measure them coming back up. This gives them an idea of what's in the ground. They can see cracks and crevices. Is it sand below? Rock? They start seeing pockets of oil. The data is pumped out to a computer system with a real-time acquisition. Tons and tons of data are coming in. The faster the equipment stores data, the faster the job is done. So the customers aren't paying as much money. "Plus, if the exploration company has already quoted a figure and we come in with a higher technology that speeds up the whole process, they save money again."

"When you get into marine exploration, exploration companies drag cable behind a large boat to do seismic surveys in the ocean. It can cost $100,000 to $200,000 per hour to keep the boat running. If we can give them a solution that stores the data in half the time, we're saving them money. As newer tape technologies come out, the idea is to get faster and put more data on a single cartridge."

Competition Comes From Cyberspace
Cypress Technologies has some new competitors these days. Their competitors used to be entities in their own geographic location. With the explosion of the Internet, competition has appeared from all over the world. Cyberspace works both ways though, and it has opened up a broader market for Cypress Technologies. Child said, "We are changing our Web site and putting up an e-commerce site for one of our customers. But our company can do something that strictly ‘dot.com' business can't. We understand what our customers do, their market, their business, and their true problems. We identify products that will help them solve their problems. They are grabbing more and more data and need real-time acquisition systems. We know the oil and gas market; so as new products become available, we'll help our customers speed up their systems even further."