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BI Vision Houston
KEYNOTES
Michael Nikolaou
 Michael Nikolaou is currently Associate Professor in the Dept. of Chemical Engineering at the University of Houston. He received a Diploma from the National Technical University, Athens, Greece, in 1984, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1989, both in chemical engineering. From 1989 to 1997 he wasinitially Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at Texas A&M University. After receiving tenure at Texas A&M, he held a Visiting Scientist position at MIT in 1995.
Dr. Nikolaou's research interests are in computer-aided process engineering, with emphasis on process modeling, identification, monitoring, and control, and their applications to the chemical, oil & gas, microelectronics, food, and life sciences industries. His research has been externally funded by the National Science Foundation; Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Shell, Frito-Lay, Department of Energy, Texas Transportation Institute, Applied Materials, Lam Research, Kellogg Brown & Root, Halliburton, Schlumberger, and Noble Drilling. He is the author or co-author of over 35 refereed journal publications, three book chapters, and numerous conference proceedings articles. His industrial experience includes consulting to Union Pacific Resources, Shell Development, Frito-Lay, Bryan Research & Engineering, Simulation Sciences, General Electric, and Noble Drilling. He has received several awards and is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Omega Chi Epsilon, The Electrochemical Society, and Technical Chamber of Greece.
Michael Economides
Michael J. Economides is a Professor at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston. Until the summer of 1998, he was the Samuel R. Noble Professor of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University and served as Chief Scientist of the Global Petroleum Research Institute (GPRI). Prior to joining the faculty at Texas A&M University, Professor Economides was the Director of the Institute of Drilling and Production at the Leoben Mining Institute in Austria (1989-1993).
From 1984 to 1989, Dr. Economides worked in a variety of senior technical and managerial positions with a major petroleum services company.
Publications include authoring or co-authoring of 10 textbooks and more than 170 journal papers and articles. Economides' texts are used in almost all academic Petroleum Engineering departments in the United States, several overseas universities, and in the training programs of most of the major companies in the petroleum industry.
Economides does a wide range of industrial consulting, including major retainers by Fortune 500 companies and national oil companies. He has worked in over 70 countries for a very large scope of projects. He is the founder and a major shareholder in OTEK (Australia), a petroleum service and consulting firm with offices in four Australian cities. He is also a partner in a Canadian Independent producer of oil and gas.
Complementing his command of the academic, technical and commercial dimensions of the global energy industry, Michael Economides is also the author of the bestseller The Color of Oil: The History, the Money and the Politics of the World's Biggest Business. He writes regularly for newspapers and other mass media outlets.
Data Mining and Pattern Recognition for Predictive Targeting in Deepwater and Ultra-Deepwater Petroleum Exploitation
In any industry, data mining can help identify significant patterns that will enable better decision-making, ultimately improving the bottom line. However, in no industry is data mining more critical than in the oil and gas exploration and production, where hundreds of millions of dollars hang in the balance with every new offshore drilling initiative. This presentation will explore advanced data mining techniques being used today for the exploitation of deepwater and ultra-deepwater petroleum, including never-before released predictive determination of oil and gas accumulations in these extraordinarily expensive environments.
Background
The energy consumption of the United States and the world has been growing almost without pause throughout the past 150 years. There is no evidence that this trend will change in the foreseeable future. Energy consumption has, in fact, replaced industrialization as the distinguishing feature that separates rich from poor nations.
Oil and natural gas constitute 61 percent of the U.S. energy mix and are forecast by most analysts (including the United States government, occasional rhetoric notwithstanding) to increase to 66 percent by the year 2020. Most estimates also suggest a 50 percent increase in energy demand over the same period.
Without a doubt, the next generation of oil and gas supplies clearly shapes as a competition between the deep (i.e., 1000 m) and ultra-deepwater (as much as 3,000 m) predominantly in the Gulf of Mexico, and ultimately extending to West Africa and Brazil, versus Saudi Arabia and similar nations. Recent events have put a considerably onerous geopolitical twist to this quest.
The Project
Deepwater oil and gas development represents a trillion-dollar economic driver for the United States. Leadership in deepwater technology and equipment fabrication, and the stimulus that it provides to local communities is at stake in addition to the more compelling issues of energy independence and security.
Cost reduction such the shortening of design cycles, i.e., using high-intensity design procedures to zero in on optimized design and construction is broadly accepted and advocated as the essential step towards the making of ultra-deep water resources economically competitive. One important indicator it the activation index, which is measured in dollars required per stabilized production rate. This index currently at about $10,000/ barrel/day must come down to about $4,000/barrel/day for the ultra-deep water to compete with Saudi Arabia or other major producers.
Two components appear to be crucial in accomplishing this goal:
- Substantial, fundamental and multi-faceted research (which is now highly fragmented, dissected and of very-low intensity) is needed. A major government initiative for an “offshore technology roadmap” of almost $3 billion over seven years has already passed the House of Representatives and is now part of the US Senate bill, under debate. We have been instrumental in drafting this initiative.
- The second issue, now the subject of one of our ongoing research activities, is the ability to forecast reservoir rock and hydrocarbon type and fluid behavior at great depths and below ultra-deep waters. Such an improvement in current industry capabilities will cut very substantial costs and reduce the even more disheartening exploration failures.
We are testing now a series of theories correlating behavior of known reservoirs throughout the world (we have access to over 1000 sets of data) with depth, reservoir typing and lithology both onshore and, especially, offshore. The ultimate purpose is to predict with high likelihood the occurrence of commercial hydrocarbons, especially the presence of underlain oil and natural gas reservoirs, either a priori or below already discovered accumulations.
In examining very large and diverse sets of data we have initiated rather extensive data mining, using state-of-the-art software and algorithms, including the deployment of new ones. Sifting through data, we are looking for patterns that match these goals. Predictive data mining is a search for very strong patterns in big data sets that can be generalized to accurately allow savvy future decisions.
We are also developing pattern recognitions which can be used for petroleum exploration everywhere, ultra-deep offshore being the most compelling.
Randy Grossman
 Randy Grossman is former Senior Vice President and Director, Customer and Market Knowledge in the Retail Banking Group at Bank One, the sixth largest bank in the United States. In this capacity, Mr. Grossman was responsible for measuring the impact of all marketing programs, and for leveraging the knowledge gained from marketing research, customer data analysis, and market area analysis to improve the effectiveness of Bank One's marketing efforts.
Mr. Grossman came to Bank One from Fleet Financial Group (now FleetBoston), where he directed the organization responsible for information-based marketing, customer analysis, and data warehousing. Prior to this, he was a Manager in the Financial Institutions practice of the MAC Group. As a consultant, he helped clients identify opportunities to use information technology to enable business strategy, understand the strategic implications of profitability analysis, and develop marketing and operations strategies in the retail banking sector. From 1980 to 1982 he worked as a Research Assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA conducting statistical research on nineteenth century agricultural productivity while a doctoral student in economics at Harvard University. Mr. Grossman holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and B.S. degrees in mathematics and economics from Ohio University. He also attended Harvard University as a doctoral student in Economics.
Lessons Learned from Six Years in the Data Mines
Over the past six years, Mr. Grossman has led efforts at three institutions to mine customer data. The objective: find insights that point to ways to increase the profitability of the customer base and expand the number of customers served. In this address, he'll share some of the successes and the failures of the past six years, and will offer some observations on what these experiences have taught him about what pitfalls to avoid and opportunities to look out for, both in good economic times, and when the economy is not quite so strong.
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