A death notice in Le Monde of a certain Claude Royer, geologist, caught our attention and led to a literature search that turned up quite an interesting tale. Royer worked for what was the Elf, now TotalEnergies, and was a key player in the debunking of the ‘avions renifleurs’ (sniffer planes) that caused quite a kerfuffle in France in the late 1970s. The story is told at length on Wikipedia as the Great Oil Sniffer Hoax. Briefly, a couple of con men had convinced Elf’s management that their black box could detect hydrocarbons from the air. The invention had great strategic implications and secrecy was of the utmost importance. Only the top brass of Elf and an inner circle around the French Presidency were involved in evaluating the technology. That was until Royer was called in and spotted the trickery. The ‘images’ of oil and gas fields that appeared on the display were actually drawn on pieces of paper. The machine cleverly paged these in and out of view as the survey proceeded. Commenting on the event years later, Royer observed, speaking of the inventor, Aldo Bonassoli ,‘He was the magician who made the images appear to people who had such a strong will to see them. It gave him great pleasure to please so many people, especially such important ones!’
The Avions Renifleurs story is not really an outlier in the history of oil and gas exploration. Many oil and gas explorers are approached by folks with weird black boxes, that are supposed to detect hydrocarbons. In fact, the folks touting such machines may well believe that they work. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether a system is a scam, or whether it just does not work very well. Thus, subsequent to the Elf debacle we have seen technologies that were heralded as breakthroughs that did not quite pan-out.
In the 1990’s BP invented its own ‘sniffer plane’, a system that used an airborne-mounted laser to detect hydrocarbon seeps from oilfields which was believed to be ‘an excellent tool for frontier exploration’. As far as we know this has not quite turned up trumps.
Again, without wishing to spoil anybody’s business model, Schlumberger’s 2004 acquisition of ExxonMobil’s ‘R3M’ deep electromagnetic prospecting technology back was heralded with the claim that controlled source EM ‘could replace seismic’. Well that hasn’t happened yet!
The field of geoscience is generally well supplied with Royers who have their feet on scientific ground and are capable of detecting the more egregious examples of improbable technology. If only the same could be said for IT!
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.