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Research and TLE

TLE Editorial Board

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

In this the 20th year of TLE, the Editorial Board has decided to publish a series of 12 articles reviewing how TLE has reported specific areas of geophysics since its inception in 1982. This month's topic is research. In the last 20 years, there has been considerable change in how we define and conduct research in our industry. In the "old days," budgets in major oil companies included a large allocation for conducting basic research—i.e., research groups (populated by highly sought PhDs from the world's major universities) investigating ideas with a long-term focus or conducting expensive, specialized field experiments, or even developing new hardware on their own. And it didn't end there. Research on fundamental geophysical topics was conducted by contractors, academia, and government labs. Industry support for university research was strong and, at that time, researchers had strong influence in determining the relevant topics of research to be investigated. We see the many visible fruits of such an approach to research: advances in 3D seismic acquisition and processing, AVO, crosswell and VSP technology to mention just a few.

Today, after many years of reduced corporate budgets for research, acquisitions and mergers, and pressure on short-term return on investment, the picture is quite different in many companies. Currently, there is little corporate funding for basic research. Research projects supported by business units address problems of immediate concern to the business unit or asset team. Funding of academic and industry consortia has dropped significantly and, with . . . [Full Text of this Article]