There has been much talk about Volume Visualisation in the Gulf region, with companies such as Saudi Aramco and Adco constructing innovative Visualisation Centres in their offices.

Other companies are planning similar initiatives in the near future. The geoscience applications that are utilised in these new facilities are led by VoxelGeo, the market leader for 3D Visualisation and Volume Based Interpretation.

Paradigm Geophysical has been the leader in the business of volume visualisation and interpretation for the oil and gas industry since the early 1990's and development is continuing to keep its product, VoxelGeo, at the forefront of this growing market.

Scalable, multi-platform capability - VoxelGeo can run on any Silicon Graphics workstation, from the desktop to the Visualisation Centre. It is also as performant on Sun UltraSparcs and Blade machines with Expert 3D, Elite 3D or Creator 3D graphics boards.

The added benefit of stereo imaging being available on most Unix platforms is of immense value.

A recent initiative saw an NT version of VoxelGeo released for high-end PCs with OpenGl boards.

This means interpreters do not need to wait for time to be available in Visualisation Centres before they can take advantage of the power of a volume-based interpretation system. Then, when appropriate, all work carried out on the interpreter's desktop can be presented to Asset Team members in the Visualisation Centre, allowing collaborative discussion and refinement of the prospect.

Open architecture - seismic, interpretation and well data can be easily and rapidly shared with third party databases such as GeoFrame and OpenWorks using Paradigm's ULA software.

An integrated environment - users of VoxelGeo, Focus/Disco, GeoDepth Power and Probe, Earth Model/Explorer, GeoSec and Geolog products can all access the same data infrastructure for sharing seismic, well and interpretation data.

The common database also means that all of these products can take advantage of the import/export capabilities of ULA. The use of ULA allows the import of industry standard, and non-standard, versions of SEGY, LAS, Tobin formats, among many others. Data can be exported via the same ULA link or used to produce hard-copies of well-paths, seismic and interpretation maps within other Paradigm applications.

Support and Consultancy Infrastructure - Paradigm has support offices in 15 locations and 13 countries, including the Middle East support office in Bahrain. This means geoscientists experienced in volume-based interpretation of local data are always close at hand, in the same time zone and working the same weekdays as its clients.

Structural Interpretation - Horizons, faults and wells can be interpreted and planned in a volume-based environment, adding to the speed and accuracy of prospect generation. VoxelGeo's interpretation capabilities have been greatly enhanced in the last few years with the introduction of easy-to-use and edit-arbitrary traverses, arbitrary planes, well traverses and sections. A 3D tracking and object-identifying cursor also aids the volume investigator. The ULA import and display of deviated wells and well-logs has been available for the last two years, as has sub-sample snapping to true peaks and troughs, shrink-wrapping of geobodies, horizon filtering, grid math and bulk-shifting of attribute mapped horizons.

Stratigraphic Interpretation - all the well-known capabilities of opacity filtering, colour mapping and stretching have been improved, and are still among the most flexible and fastest in the industry. The power of formation sculpting to look into reservoir intervals has been augmented by rapid volume flattening about interpreted horizons, allowing dynamic optical stacking and panning of horizon-parallel slabs through the seismic volume.

Subvolume Detection - the most flexible 'seeding' and anomaly-detecting tool in the industry allows the user to define detection workflows using multiple seed points, multiple attribute criteria and automatic filtering of entire volumes for the most prospective anomalies.

Multi-Volume Interpretation - any seismic attribute volume can be used in VoxelGeo. Multi-volume rendering allows different attributes to be visualised in the same space. Interpreters can pick horizons, faults and well-paths in these multi-attribute displays, ensuring that as much information as possible is used when delineating a prospect. Volume maths can also be applied to create, for example, difference cubes between volumes.

Movies - for final presentations, or to aid the understanding of the spatial juxtaposition of seismic features, animated displays are a very powerful way of communicating your point of view to other geoscientists, management or investors. Proposed and existing well paths can be shown in context by 'fly-by' animations showing prospects and drilling hazards. Anything that can be viewed in VoxelGeo can be easily made into a sophisticated animation that will run on a PC or a Unix workstation. The upcoming release of VoxelGeo will include a stereo moviemaker and viewer, all included in the standard package.

Programming libraries - for users with specialist needs, Paradigm's commitment to an open, accessible environment is illustrated by the distribution of a set of programming libraries, called vgTools, which allow oil companies and third party vendors to write their own applications to work within the VoxelGeo environment. One such third party vendor is Sysdrill, which has produced a package called DirectorGeo that integrates engineering constraints into the well-planning capabilities of VoxelGeo.

DirectorGeo allows the direct input of target locations via picking in VoxelGeo's volume-based displays, and feeds back information about potential errors in location that can be QC'd and risked against the three dimensional displays of the target.

Finally, as part of the latest release Paradigm has introduced an exciting new add-on application called the Reservoir Navigator, enabling users to browse rapidly through disk-based megavolumes, with the ability to select sub-cubes to throw into shared memory for more detailed stratigraphic and structural analysis in VoxelGeo.

As with VoxelGeo the Reservoir Navigator works on both SGI and Sun desktop machines as well as on the super computers used in Visualisation Centres.

VoxelGeo and other Paradigm products are on display at Stand No. 516 at MEOS.