UK-based Cognitive Geology has raised £2 million from private equity houses Maven Capital Partners and Enso Ventures to support roll-out of its Hutton software. Cognitive CEO Luke Johnson told Oil IT Journal, ‘Hutton solves the issue of spatial sampling bias in geological datasets. Oilfield data is biased as higher quality reservoir is always over represented. The problem is worst in offshore datasets. Our TrendAware technology searches the dataset for patterns relating to depositional and burial history teasing-out geologically-realistic ways of explaining the dataset.’
‘While different scenarios may fit the data, this doesn’t mean they are equally probable. Hutton uses quality of fit and the nature of the residual to determine the most realistic scenarios. We find that results emulate the behavior of experienced geologists.’ Hutton’s main contribution is in removing interpreter bias. ‘In almost every peer review I’ve been involved in, geologists get too attached to their preferred scenario and the outcome is too narrow.’ Hutton embeds geostatistical techniques such as variography and sequential gaussian simulation. Johnson confided, ‘an expert could achieve most of this using any geostatistical packages but we estimate that this would takes about 200 mouse clicks in peer packages. In Hutton it takes five or less and can be done right by a novice user.’
The funding will accelerate the roll out of Hutton to oil companies and enable Cognitive to further develop its pipeline of petroleum geoscience software.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.