Microseismic 101: Turning Science into a Business
0:00 Hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Energy 101. We are the digital wall catters. You're here with myself, Sydney. We've got Julie and Misty and our guest of honor today is Dr.
0:12 Peter Duncan from micro seismic. I there. And right before we got started, he told us that he is a frustrated professor at heart. So today we are his students and classes in session and we will
0:24 probably frustrate you with all of our questions. Yeah. We're probably even more We're going to say a class, not at all, but there is a test at the end of the show. I should have. I should take
0:35 now. Yeah. I know on my phone.
0:39 Thank you for joining us today. So give us a little bit of your background, how you got into the industry and how micro seismic came about. Wow. How long do you have? No.
0:51 So actually I am a geophysicist by training PhDs in geophysics And I have been a geophysicist my entire life. I mean, that really my entire life. When I went away to university a long time ago,
1:06 1969, I knew I wanted to take science, I didn't know what, and I got introduced to geology, and that really fascinated me. And I went to work in Newfoundland, I'm Canadian, went to work in
1:19 Newfoundland on a diamond drilling project, hunting for copper, and during that summer I became the helper, you know, the gopher on a geophysical crew that was doing induced polarization, not
1:33 seismic, induced polarization, something that's not used in the oil business. And I loved it, it was treasure hunting with neat toys. And I went back to the university the next year, so I'm 18
1:47 years old, I went back to the university and I said, I want to be a geophysicist. And the head of the department said, I know how to make you a geophysicist, and I've been one ever since. So I
1:58 went on and I, I, I, got a degree in geology, and then I went to grad school in geophysics, I went to work for Shell doing research in the mining industry. Actually, during my undergraduate
2:09 worked underground in Sudbury as a mine geologist and a mine geophysicist, and went to work for Shell and did research, and I was in the mining end, and then Shell decided to get out of the mining
2:20 business and
2:24 retooled me as a seismologist in the oil and gas business. And I will tell you that seismology was the only geophysical discipline that I had zero experience.
2:36 Consequently, that must have been why Shell said you are now a geophysicist, or rather a seismologist. So I went to Shell School, which is a really good school
2:46 to go to for seismology in. And then just about that time, 3D seismic, which you might have heard of, was becoming kind of O'Koron. And I became the party chief on the first shell in the world.
3:00 first shell 3D program offshore Nova Scotia, and that was a great experience in what it led to was me leaving Shell to go to work for a seismic contractor based here in Houston who was trying to
3:15 bring 3D seismic to the market. And I moved down to Houston, told my wife we'd moved for three years, that was in 1986, and we're still here
3:27 And so what happened was I sort of brought the practice or helped this company develop their practice of 3D seismic. And then along the way, Houston is such an entrepreneurial environment, I had
3:40 the opportunity to move from doing seismic to actually becoming an oil company. And with two other guys, we took our knowledge of 3D seismic kind of at a major oil company level and found it a
3:57 little company to do 3D seismic not as a service company, but as an oil and gas company in the market and partner with Independents. And we raised some venture capital and then eventually took our
4:11 company public. Wow, awesome, I was about to ask how it went. Yeah, well we - Sometimes it doesn't - Whoa! So it went really well for a while. And then 1999 happens. And in 1999, you couldn't
4:25 raise money for an oil and gas venture. And we started getting AFE out of all of our deals and we drilled wells in places we had no business drilling wells, Africa, out in the deep water of the
4:36 Gulf of Mexico. So anyway, we kind of crashed and burned. We got bought out and I went back from the buy side that is being an oil and gas company back into the technology side. Still doing
4:51 seismic. But I kind of, what would I say? I wanted to find something new. maybe bored with 3D seismic and wanted to do something different and I actually ran into this professor, MacArthur genius
5:09 grant fellow, a really smart guy, kind of off the wall, lived on the top of a mountain up in Colorado. And he had, he threw friends approached me and said, Look, I've got some ideas about doing
5:21 seismic exploration, but not using dynamite, not using vibrators, but something called passive seismic, where you just listen to the earth rather than send a sound in and get the reflection, but
5:35 just listen to the earth. And from that, tell something about what's going on. Now, you might listen to earthquakes happening somewhere far away. And from the sound that traverses the earth
5:50 between the earthquake and where you put your geophone on the ground, you could tell something about the structure of the earth. We can do that. Or there might be activities of the engineer going
6:00 on, that you listen to how the Earth's responding and be able to tell them something about whether they're doing good deed. So it might be that they're injecting waste fluid and you wanna know where
6:12 that's going or it might be that they're fracking the rock or it might be that they are drilling a well and you really wanna know where that drill bit is and so you could listen to hear the drill bit
6:25 and then map where it's occurring and so on So we started to pursue that. This professor had some software and some intellectual property which I gave him some stock and a new company to found and we
6:37 founded micro-sizemaking and. What year was this? 2003. Okay. And we then went out and raised a little venture capital from some people that I knew from the old business, started with friends and
6:51 family, then some venture capital and then some more venture capital and the first bit of money was just,
6:58 does this science make any sense? Right. And we went off to the field and tried a few things and it seemed to make sense. So then we raised a little bit more to see whether the science could be
7:07 turned into a business. There's a big difference between the science. Yeah, one. And so we raised a little bit more and the business started to take off. And we were growing, in fact, what
7:17 happened was the shale gale came along. And one of the things that shale people needed to do when they fracked the rock was know where the fracks were going They had these very simple models for how
7:32 the rock broke and how their wells, when they fracked them, reacted. And their models were all wrong.
7:41 And how did they know their models were wrong? Well, the wells weren't behaving the way they thought they should. And so they approached the industry, me and other people who were in this
7:51 micro-size-maker, passive-size-mic business. And we started listening as they fracked And as we listened, we were able to tell them that what was going on down there was a whole bunch different
8:02 than they thought. And so the business took off and all of a sudden I didn't have any time for doing anything else except crack monitoring. And that became my principal business and we grew so fast
8:15 exponentially that we attracted private equity and private equity came in and did a big investment in us in 2010 and we were on the way to going public again and
8:36 then things started to turn in the industry. And there were a couple of things that happened number one in North America where
8:49 most of our business was. The shale gale was largely a North American phenomena and the engineers had started to get to the point. where they began to understand the plays or feel they did at any
9:02 rate, and not need the frack monitoring as much. 'Cause they thought they could do it on their own. Yeah, they thought they understood things. So they'd figured out the formula. Or because it's
9:12 like already mapped, right, or no. Well, no, every well is a little bit different. Different, okay.
9:18 If you've ever driven along a road cut, you know if you watch the rocks, the rocks change very fast. Yes, yes. And if you're drilling a well that's two miles long, a horizontal well that's two
9:27 miles long, along that length, there can be a lot of change, but they'd begun to think that they knew it well enough. But the other thing that happened is that the whole oil business changed in
9:40 the 2018-2019 timeframe. The investors in the oil business started to say, well, they used to reward these oil companies for increasing reserves. You increase the reserves every year, your stock
9:55 value is going to stay up and that. That's how we're going to recognize you as a viable company. They changed. And the investors started to say, No, what we want you to do is return money to the
10:08 stakeholders, to the stockholders. And so the focus became not so much fine new reserves as produce what you've got economically and make a profit And so all of a sudden
10:27 the oil companies, our clients were rewarded for not spending money. And things like frack monitoring became discretionary expenditures, which they only made when they were in new areas, or
10:41 something really bad happened very well. Because the engineer thought they knew what was going on, didn't And so the frack monitoring business took a hit because of that change. And then COVID
10:55 happened and we couldn't send crews to the field and nobody else could send crews to the field. And so our business, I mean, we went from 250 employees to five in 2020. And I had to lay off all
11:07 the, even laid myself off. Just kept five people who could keep the furnace on. You know, that sort of thing. But let's come back. Crews are going back out into the field And on the frack
11:22 monitoring side, what happened was as the well spacing in these shale plays became smaller and smaller, there started to be interactions between the wells. So they'd be fracking well A and well B
11:38 would get hit by that frack and may be damaged. We had clients who experienced having well bores sheared off. Well, I mean, it's one thing to drill a well and it not perform as well as you would
11:52 like. whole other thing if you drill a well and then the well next door shears it off and you lose it completely. That's a good way to limit your career. So the engineers started and our business
12:06 began to grow again, but instead of helping people drill a better well, it was more helping people keep from having any kind of frack driven interaction that would be negative on their wealth I have
12:22 a question about that. So prior to this, I mean, I would think if you're drilling well, do people have some sort of idea of how close they can get? And they just hoped they didn't hit it? Yes.
12:35 The other well, they were just kind of like a drill and pray. Well, actually, go bad. Actually, when they first started doing fracking, the phrase pump and Pray was actually
12:50 was actually used by people to describe their approach to completing wells. So as the micro seismic business got better, the one of the first products we would deliver is something called the
13:02 stimulator reservoir volume, which would be based on the cloud of step crackle pop that we would hear as they cracked the rock, we would draw a balloon around that and say, well, you're probably
13:12 going to drain this much rock. And they would say, good, well, then I'll put my other well right twice that distance away. And the two balloons will just kind of touch. And that's good. But the
13:24 problem is that that balloon size would vary down the length of the well. Yeah. And it would vary from rock type to rock type. It would vary from play to play. And so it wasn't very predictable.
13:37 Well, I was going to say, I feel like, I mean, as we know, these operations are expensive and then it seems like something not smart to guess at. Yes. And so. And.
13:49 I'm glad you said that because we would always go out with the value proposition. Look, you're spending 10 to 20 million dollars drilling and completing a well. What's a couple hundred thousand
13:59 dollars to make sure you do it well, to do it right. But when the industry changed to being value driven, to being expense driven, and where the prevailing attitude was, my well is doing good
14:14 enough, I don't need to spend a penny more on science, then that that whole idea kind of went away until they started to lose wells because of the fracture driven interaction. And lose money. And
14:28 then they came back to us and said, okay, well, now we need to start the wells. And it's neat because what we do is we actually monitor in real time. I mean, we're telling them results 10
14:40 minutes after they've started pumping. And we'll say, oops, we're seeing something that could be damaging to your well happening. You should curtail your pump.
14:50 decrease the rate you're pumping out, decrease the pressure that you're pumping out so that you can save your well. And that's kind of where our frack monitoring business has gone to. Instead of,
15:02 let's make a better well, or let's find out what the well spacing is, more to how do I protect my wells in real time now? This kind of decreased business that happened in 2020 That gave us the
15:19 opportunity to look at some of the other things that we had considered doing with passive seismic, with our stethoscope in the past. And we had a couple of really neat bluebirds or black swans
15:35 happen to us that has allowed us to now stop being a one trick pony, frack monitoring, and get into doing other kinds of business The first thing that happened is it is. mining operator
15:53 in Florida came to us and said, I've got an issue in Florida. There's a lot of karsting that is limestone that gets dissolved out and forms a cave in the subsurface. And sometimes, you've probably
16:07 been to the caverns over here near San Antonio or on the way to San Antonio. That's a limestone gate. It gets eroded out by the groundwater. The groundwater keeps seeping down into it from above.
16:19 And often, there will be a bit of a chimney open up to the surface. And when that chimney hits the surface, the ground falls in and it creates what we call a sinkhole. Well, in Miami, people
16:30 have their houses falling into these sinkholes all the time. And Florida is just a great big carbonate platform. Well, this group, they had an industrial facility, actually a waste disposal
16:43 facility for one of their mining operations. that had a bunch of acidic water sitting in a pond and a sinkhole opened up underneath it. And this acidic water went down into the potable water table.
16:58 And it cost them nearly100 million to fix this problem. What happens if it goes into the water table? Well, they have to drill wells around and suck that water out and monitor and make sure that it
17:10 doesn't get out into people's yards and all that sort of stuff And they get put on notice by the government, by the department of the environment that if you don't fix this, you're gonna be out of
17:22 business. And we're talking about a facility that generates more than a million dollars a day in profit. Jeez. So they came to us and they said, We've tried every other geographical technique. Is
17:31 there something that this stethoscope of yourscould help us with? And I said, Don't know, but let's give it a shot. And we did, we went out and we planted our stethoscope around the facility and
17:41 we started to listen. And sure enough, we started to hear.
17:47 snapcrackle pop that sounded like it was bits falling into a hole. And we said, we think there might be something over there, they drilled into it. They found a hole, they filled it with cement
17:56 and they prevented another environmental disaster. So that gave us a little bit of a leg up. And actually that started in 2018 and developing that. And then the contract that came out of that
18:08 helped us survive through 2020. Love that And so then lately, I mean, so using exactly the same ideas lately, I'm sure you've heard of CCUS.
18:23 carbon capture, utilization and storage. That's in buzzword these days. Yeah. So in the government, the US. government, DOE is spending a fortune on trying to get that industry going. And it's
18:39 great because it enables the oil and gas business if we can find a way to capture the CO2. that's emitted during some of our hydrocarbon related activities, then it gives a longer lifespan to the
18:55 hydrocarbon related activities. I like that, hydrocarbon related activities. So we had, the
19:05 DOE is spending about25 billion over five years on one aspect of that is, and that is the monitoring of the sequestration of the CO2 What does that mean? So they capture the CO2, and when they
19:18 capture the CO2, one of the things they can do is utilize it. They can utilize it for enhanced oil recovery, or they can utilize it to make better cement. People are sticking CO2 in cement that
19:28 makes stronger cement. They can utilize, there's one company I've seen that's making eyeglasses out of recycled CO2. That's really cool. But a lot of the CO2 is actually, or at least a lot of the
19:40 thought about how we're gonna deal with this CO2, is to stick it into. saltwater aquifers at depth and just let it lie there for the rest of time. But if you drill in and stick it down there, you
19:55 need to verify that it is gonna stay there. That when you put it in, you can imagine, I'm gonna stick a straw down and I'm gonna start pumping into the ground. Well, the first thing you don't
20:06 wanna do is cause any earthquakes. 'Cause sometimes if you pump fluids in the ground, it lubricates preexisting faults. Don't they do that with the water? Yeah, they do, they're creating
20:15 earthquakes with
20:17 disposal wells. Yeah, there were some in Midland. Well, the West Texas is now the most seismically active area in the United States. It used to be California. It ain't California anymore, it's
20:29 West Texas. Why? Because of this CO2 going in. Or not CO2, the wastewater. And this is actually not something that you need to worry about 'cause it's a well understood engineering issue And what
20:43 you do is, if you monitor. and we do, and you monitor and you start to see that there's seismic activity increasing that seems to be correlated with your pumping. You just reduce the rate of the
20:55 pumping, the fluids leak off, and the chance for seismicity goes away. It's like
21:04 hydroplaning with your car. If you have fluid on top of a road, and your car goes over it and it tries to compress the fluid, it reduces the friction on your wheels, and the tires skid. Well, if
21:16 you would pump water into the subsurface, and there are faults in there, and those faults are pressed together, you force the water into those faults. And all of a sudden they become lubricated,
21:28 and they can slip. And if a big enough area gets lubricated, then it's a bigger seismic event. The bigger the area is lubricated, the bigger the motion, the bigger the event, and the chance that
21:40 you'll see something on the surface, or that a church steeple will fall over, somebody's dishes will fall off of all that sort of. So it's exactly the same with CO2. So the government has said,
21:52 we want to make sure that you monitor when you're injecting the CO2 and you watch for any induced seismicity so that if you start to see it, you can curtail or cut back on the amount that you're
22:06 injecting in order to be able to prevent any seismicity being felt at the surface, which would probably damage your social license to practice. So that's one. Now then if you do start to get motion
22:21 on faults, you may crack the seal. When they stick it into the ground, just like an oil and gas reservoirs, there has to be a cap on the top, a seal that keeps the CO2 in the ground. 'Cause when
22:33 you pump the CO2 in, it's lighter and it wants to rise to the surface and it rises up against this cap rock and then spreads out underneath it like a mushroom Mm-hmm I was going to say mushroom cloud,
22:45 but that's probably not very politics. It's a mushroom against SEO. So if you were to get cracks in that, it could escape and then get up towards the surface. Now the that could be not a good
22:58 thing. And
23:01 so they want us to monitor them to make sure that the cap is maintained. And once again, if we hear a snapcrackle pop, we identify where and they might drill down and just stick out in the cat in
23:13 the crack. And then the third thing is when they put that CO2 in and it goes up against the cap rock and it spreads out like a mushroom cap, you want to make sure that it doesn't go around the edges
23:25 of your seal. So you have a geologic map of what this reservoir that you're sticking the CO2 in looks like. And as the CO2 expands, we can hear it micro seismically. And if it starts to get out
23:41 towards the edges of where that cap is. then you might have to move where you're injecting. So, all of those things seem to be really well-posed problems for doing micro-sizemic, and the DOE had
23:54 announced that they were gonna spend two and a half billion dollars on technology development to monitor these kinds of things. And so, we wrote to them and said, Well, look, we're doing this
24:08 stuff in Florida, and it's exactly the same kind of problem in technology as you're asking to be deployed on CO2, and they gave us a grant. Wow, amazing. So, we have taken this grant to
24:24 re-engineer our technology that we're using in Florida, and then we got a second grant to now go deploy it. So, the first was just funding of an engineering study, and then the second grant was to
24:39 say, You can go in the field So we're now actually talking to several. different parties about their CO2 injection sites and having us go out and do the monitoring on it paid for by
24:55 the DOE. That's awesome. So that's another new business. Yeah, yeah for sure. And then the other thing that's happened is you've probably heard of geothermal energy.
25:06 The Earth's core is the biggest nuclear reactor that we have in here near us. The sun would be the next one But it's a little farther away. But all that heat coming from the Earth's core leaks out
25:19 towards the surface. And there are lots of people doing
25:23 harvesting of that heat for domestic purposes. These are small scale things where you put pipes down on the ground and you have heat pumps and stuff like that. But a more exciting, at least more
25:35 exciting to me, that's more industrial scale is what they call enhanced geothermal systems. So you drill down a little bit deeper. into the really hot, dry rocks, and you harvest the heat from
25:47 them. The problem is these hot, dry rocks are very impermeable. They're granites for the most part, or volcanic rocks, or some sort of - Break all the tools. Well, and you can't put the fluid
25:57 through it. Yeah. You need to harvest the heat. You need
26:02 to flow fluid through the rock and have a big enough surface area that you're gonna be able to harvest the heat from that rock fast enough to bring it back up to the surface and then at the surface,
26:14 use it to drive a turbine or something like that. And you need to do that at a rate that is commercial. That is there has to be enough heat brought to the surface without cooling where you're
26:27 getting the heat 'cause if you cool it and then have to shut down for a while while it heats up again, well, that's not good. So the theory is this thing called enhanced geothermal systems where
26:38 they drill down into the subsurface, these impermeable hot rocks. and then they frack them. And they frack them just exactly like we did the shales for exactly the same reason. They had to frack
26:50 the shales because they're impermeable. The fluid doesn't flow through it. In the shale business, we frack those rocks so that the hydrocarbons would come out. In the hand-stereothermal, we frack
27:03 the rocks so that the fluids will flow through it. We're basically building radiators, or if you've ever seen electric, we don't have them around here much, but electric radiators, they have all
27:16 these little fins on them. Well, every one of those fins is like the frack that we're gonna create in this batholith, this granite rock, and we're gonna flow water through those little fins and
27:29 then bring the water back up to the surface, and we need to create a lot of surface area. Well, it's exactly the same technology as used in the shale Now, people have known about doing an ants
27:40 geothermal for years, probably 40, 50 years. And there have been, I think on the order of 14, maybe 15 enhanced geothermal projects in the world so far. That seems, I can't decide if that's low
27:57 or high. It's, I would, I think it's low. Okay. Okay, and, but none of them have been economic. Yeah. Not only, and bad things have happened, like in Basil Switzerland in 2005 or six, they
28:13 tried creating a batholith and they, they knocked a lot of dishes off the wall when they did the fracking. And the civil engineer who pulled the levered that he was put in jail for a couple of days,
28:26 because you're creating earthquakes. Oh, yay. And so, and they've had a big project in Australia that ran for five years and just couldn't create enough heat economically to compete with
28:41 hydrogarbons.
28:42 And I think that's still the case. But what's happened, sort of a
28:48 benefit of the oil and gas business collapsing has been that there's been a bunch of frack engineers who were looking for other things to do. Just like I've been as a monitoring, looking for other
29:02 things to do. And these frack engineers have this marvelous experience in fracking jails over the last 20 years. And they started to look at what the enhanced geothermal people were doing and saying,
29:14 well, you've got it all wrong, guys. We've learned how to do better than that. And so now there's a whole new generation of enhanced geothermal projects starting up, a couple in the states here.
29:27 And what do they need to do? They need to monitor to see where those fracks are and whether they're creating the right kind of a heat exchanger. So that's another business opportunity for me to take
29:39 what I had already developed. and was already known by the shale fracking engineers and say, Hey guys, remember me?
29:49 I can help you with this problem too. And so we now have four verticals. I think you called it four verticals, are sort of our frack monitoring business that helps people prevent frack driven
30:01 interactions between wells or negative frack driven interactions. We have the carst alert, which is looking for sinkholes before they're a sinkhole So that you can prevent it from becoming a
30:11 sinkhole. We have the CO2 sequestration, which there isn't a lot of it going on right yet. Actually, there's only, I think, three or four active wells in the United States right now that are
30:23 doing CO2 sequestration. All of them are being monitored by sort of experimental micro seismic businesses, but we're gonna make it a real business. And there's a market there, it's maybe a couple
30:34 of years out. And then finally, there's this enhanced geothermal we call that micro. normal energy. That's our brand.
30:44 Oh, I should say our cars are CO2. We have a brand on that it's called CO2 secure. Oh, yeah. And
30:52 then we have micro thermal energy where we are making ourselves available to help these engineers who are pursuing EGS have y'all had any geothermal we've done a couple of geothermal jobs, but not on
31:07 EGS. Okay, some more conventional where we were tracking the fluids that they were injecting to harvest the heat, but we're only now starting to get bids on projects that where they're actually
31:18 going to frack. Right. Probably because it's just now starting up. It's just now starting up. And the company that's farthest ahead in this in the US that's kind of come with some ex chevron
31:31 people and just got funded last summer called Fervo.
31:36 They're speaking at our conference. We have a geothermal panel at our Fuse Conference and they're on it. And well, they're ex chevron frack engineers, at least their science, their elevator
31:48 pitches. We're ex chevron frack engineers who understand how to do this, right? They've raised some money and we've been talking to them about helping them monitor their frack. Awesome, that's
31:58 awesome. I do have some questions about y'all's technology. I'm very curious because we did have an episode, probably two episodes ago
32:08 with Debra Seigree, and she came on and told us, do you know her? It was really cool, 'cause she worked in the '70s in oil and gas, and it was really cool hearing her experience from '70s in the
32:20 technology that changed, and on that, it was cool, so it's cool hearing your perspective as well, but she kind of walked us through 3D seismic, and she told us about how they get it, you're
32:32 typical, what do you call it? The normal, like not micro-seismic, what y'all do, cause vibrations and it comes up. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Reflection-sized, big 3D reflection-sized, make you
32:45 use sound sources. Yes. Like an ultrasound. Yes. So what is, is the way that you do it, where you call it your stethoscope, is that more accurate? Or is it just a different way to collect data?
33:01 And second question, you say you listen to the data, is that like it's being monitored in like maps? Or do you actually like, listen to the data?
33:15 Okay, sure. So
33:18 the sound, whether it's conventional seismic or what we're doing, it is sound, okay? So when I say we collect the data, it's listening, because we're listening to a mechanical thing that is
33:30 sound. Now, the sounds that are used to image deep in the earth two low frequencies. you to hear it okay yeah they're typically seismic frequencies are typically in the range of of 10 to 100 hertz
33:48 got it and if you're really young and really good you might hear down to 20 hertz I know I was thinking to it was like someone in a room right I don't like say well but I will tell you at at one of
34:01 the scg conventions a few years ago it's probably five or six years ago we actually took our micro seismic data frack monitoring from three different plays so it was the Barnett and I think the
34:15 Eagleford and and the Utica shale or something and we scaled them up in frequency so that is we made them higher frequency and then we had on our booth where you could put on a set of headphones and
34:27 you could listen to it and we asked you to identify which play of us oh that's so that is if you got it right uh you got a prize yeah anyway so we do listen now okay Conventional seismic to
34:41 micro-sizemic, is it more accurate? No, but we're actually kind of listening for different things. So with conventional seismic, you're trying to map, make an image of what the subsurface looks
34:58 like. Whereas in micro-sizemic, what we're listening for is places where there's been movement in the audience. To map the location of a fault or something that's moving or a fluid front. So we're
35:14 actually looking at different things and we don't typically see what conventional seismic sees any more than they see what we see. That makes so much more sense. So there is a good way to think
35:30 about it. It's a little bit technical, but when they set off a seismic event, When they set off a dynamite charge, let's say, to do imaging, the sound wave goes down and it hits a reflector and
35:44 it bounces back up. And that point, you can think of that point where it hit the reflector as now emitting a new sound. Okay, that sound goes down, it bounces up. Well, that reflection point is
36:00 really a new source. And with conventional seismic, they're mapping the continuity of those new sources. Okay. In our case, it actually is a source, because it's something moving down there that
36:16 generates a sound and we capture it and we map where it came from. Right. So in that sense, there are actually really, really equivalent processes. Yeah. And the math is exactly the same. Okay.
36:28 But the difference is, with reflection seismic, they're setting the source up here, and then they're looking for the secondary sources down there that are artificial. Whereas we're looking for the
36:39 natural source, the depth, and we're just mapping where they look in. That makes sense. But we don't get any information about what's going on in between those natural sources. Whereas with
36:51 reflection seismic, you're creating that reflection point all along, and then you can map it out as a continuity. Right. And what, so when we're doing our work, we're looking for things that are
37:05 kind of random points Located in the subsurface, that are discontinuous. Whereas in conventional seismic, they're looking for things that are continuous. So it's all, it's the flip side of the
37:17 coin. Right. And people who interpret conventional seismic often have a hard time doing micro seismic because we're the noise that they got rid of before. Right. And what we're filtering out of
37:31 our images is the signal that they used to use right you're like a yin and yang
37:37 Yeah. We are definitely in and yet. Do you need to use both whenever you're like, let's say, fracking a well. Do you need the conventional at first and then you need to monitor with micro?
37:47 Absolutely, because if you didn't have the conventional at first, you wouldn't know where to put your well board. Right, right. So you put the well board and you drill the well board
37:54 into that image, like below the top of the table here and you stick your well board in there, but then you frack it. And you have no idea where you're going. The sizing's not gonna, the
38:04 conventional sizing, that you've already put into the can, that you've already collected. It's not gonna see where you frack now. And that's not gonna tell you when you're getting close to your
38:13 neighboring well. That's right, so then we listen and we, but we start with the map that they've created and we then map all the little snap-cracking pops and see whether it's confined within those
38:25 layers or, and if it starts to go outside those layers, you know, if they start to frack up in something that is an aquifer that has water that they don't wanna be involved with, then we tell them
38:35 to stop. Do you guys work on site or is it, or is the data like coming to you guys remotely? Uh, yes.
38:48 All of the time. So in the, a long time ago, when we were first in the business, the data would typically be collected in the field, put on to tape, brought back to the processing center, and
39:01 it might take us anywhere, well, worst cases, six months Wow. To get an answer back to the, how was that even worth it? Yeah. Well, that's a really, really good question. And it, but it was
39:16 the best we could do. Right. Okay. And, and this was true of 3D seismic back in the old days, 3D seismic, you would shoot a 3D seismic survey out in the ocean. And you, you might not get data
39:27 for a year. So you just don't, you just don't like, you don't have a project until that's finished. That's right So with us, we would go out and we'd click. data in the field and then we'd bring
39:40 it back to the shop and we'd process it and the problem is
39:45 what are you going to do with knowing how to frack a well three months later knowing whether you frack the well correctly you want to know it right away so that you know what to do differently yeah so
39:54 there was a lot of market pressure for us to shorten that time frame and one of the things we had to do was then put our computers because there's a lot of data more data in micro seismic than in
40:05 conventional 3d really so we we need to put our computers out in the field right and process the data right there in the field in real time and so we started doing that oh 2008 9 it's around that but
40:24 geophysicists are expensive and geophysicists of your generation Don't want to go to the field. Okay. They want to be able to. So what we started to do actually is have command and control. So we
40:40 couldn't bring the data back to our processing center through the cloud. Communications, satellite communications were too expensive for that amount, that amount of data. But what we could do is,
40:53 you know, put the command and control. And so we would have a satellite dish. And the geophysicists would be sitting in our office or in their bedroom. And they would be processing the data
41:09 remotely. And then the answers would be transmitted to our client. And we took that to a pretty, pretty
41:18 good level of application to the extent what we actually had some work in China. And so we put our computers in a sea chest and sent it to China. We got China cabinet
41:35 And it had a satellite dish on the top, and we actually did work for BP, where the well was being tracked in China. And our geophysicist who was doing the processing was here, but the processing
41:49 was happening in China in the field. And then the answers would be sent to Houston to BP's. And it was all happening in real time. And we actually had our chief geophysicist at the time was at a
42:01 convention. And I think he was at a convention in Amsterdam. And he was sitting next to a BP geophysicist. And he said, buddy, you want to see our frack? And
42:14 he got out his iPad. And he showed him in real time the frack that was going on in China. That's crazy. So nowadays, the amount of data that you can transmit has gotten faster and faster, and in
42:30 the field, we're typically putting 5G cells.
42:39 or even now experimenting with Starlink, which is even faster. Is that the, yeah, it's the e-lung one? Yeah, yeah. And so now - I was gonna say Tesla, and I'm like, it's a related but not
42:46 cracked. Same idea, yeah. So more and more, like in our other three verticals, the Karst alert and the CO2 secure and the EGS stuff, more and more of that, the data are actually being brought
43:00 back over the cloud into our shop The conventional seismic, there's still a fair amount of that that we do with edge computing, or the conventional microsides, the frack monitoring, it's probably
43:13 about
43:15 5050. But within another couple of years, we probably won't be needing the edge computing, it's just we'll bring all the data back. However, the geophysicists are still sitting in their bedroom
43:25 and communicating with the computers 'cause they don't really care where the computers are or where the data is, it can be anywhere now. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome If I was a geophysicist, I'd
43:34 want to go to the field. I just want to go to the field in general. You're high. You're high, let me on. Let's talk.
43:43 I'm done. I feel like I've learned enough in art. We've done three seismic podcasts. I've learned a lot of them all, yeah. Almost an expert. Yeah, perfect.
43:54 Well then I have a question for you. Is this where the test comes in? The test. I feel like we taste it. I feel like it always amazes me like as we keep talking about seismic and geothermal and
44:05 stuff I think outside of your conventional oil and gas, it always amazes me like everything that goes on in the subsurface and everything, all the moving parts at a well site and everything that
44:16 goes into drilling well, monitoring it's insane. It's very cool, it is. It's phenomenal technology and I think that's what got me interested in the beginning was the marrying of something that is
44:32 real, the earth. Yeah. And you can imagine you. conceive of what the earth looks like down there and start with something in your mind. But then the technologies allow you to actually see it and
44:46 make a better and better image in the subsurface. But it's not like you're dealing with atoms, and it's not like you're dealing with galaxies that are hundreds of millions of light years away,
44:59 something that you can actually hold in your hand and shoot. It is treasure hunting No matter whether we're looking for lithium or copper or gold or oil and gas or geothermal heat, this is treasure
45:11 hunting and the rewards for being good at it are pretty substantial. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, when we had Deborah on, I just told her how like unappreciated geologist geophysicists, people who study
45:28 the earth are because it's like you're an astronaut and everyone's like, Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Where you are. I don't know when you study the ocean. I'm like, that's so cool. But no one
45:40 talks about like studying rocks, the ground in our earth and it being actually really, really cool because you're discovering things that are unseen. Exactly. I think it's cool, but I've always
45:52 thought it was cool. But we geologists and geophysicists were not very social. And so we don't do a very good job of going out and evangelizing for our training. Yeah, this is why you come on
46:06 podcast. This is why you come on podcast, that's
46:09 right. I actually, my stepdad, he is, I think he was a geologist. He would always give gifts like rocks. So I still have one, he gave me as a really nice rock. I don't know what it is. It's a
46:22 really nice rock, really nice rock. It's very, very heavy, but it was like our wedding gift. And it's like, I don't even know what to do with it. It's just a rock, but - Prop the door open.
46:30 It's very cool It's like a bowl, like I use it as a bowl for - dog toys for a while.
46:38 But it was a really nice rock. I just don't know what kind of it was. I don't think I appreciated geology enough back then. I understand. I understand. And I, I mean, shoot, when I was
46:48 starting out, when I told you I was first year, I got interested in it. And one of my first field trips, we went to a quarry. And that quarry was often used from getting a black granite type
47:02 rocks to make gravestones on.
47:06 And it just happened to be one that had a fly in it. And it was a gravestone, but it had a name on it. And I picked it up and took it home as a say.
47:14 In university, I lived in residence and sort of had to bed with a desk at the end. And my pillow, so my head was up against it. And I put that headstone. And so when I would sleep, I'd be down
47:28 underneath with this. And it turned out But I think it's a small community where I come from in New Brunswick. no, my grandmother knew the person,
47:39 but
47:41 no, actually, when I left the university, I left it in the library of that residence that I was living. But the thing was the point being that I really liked the rock. Right. It was a pretty
47:54 rock. And so I took it home, but there's a certain amount of weirdness to that. Don't you think liking rocks enough that you carry them home? It's a little weird, but it's okay.
48:13 I have a box that I've shipped around with me and yeah, moving from eastern Canada, western Canada, then down here, and it always gets moved around. You're very heavy. I think my wife has thrown
48:16 a lot of them out because it keeps getting lighter.
48:22 Do y'all have any other questions? I don't think so. Let's wrap it fire. Yeah Let me see. Okay. Um. In your opinion, what is the biggest misconception in energy?
48:41 In my opinion, the biggest misconception about our industry, the energy industry, is that we don't care about the environment. And time and time again, when you go off into the papers and you
48:56 hear people talk, energy, any energy creation is bad
49:05 The only thing that we in the oil business or in the mining business or maybe more generally in the energy business, the only thing we care about is making money. And that is so untrue.
49:18 What attracted me and most of my contemporaries, my peers, into the industry is a love of the earth and nature and a desire to understand it better and sure to reap the benefits of it but not
49:34 destroy it, when I was a student and I would go in the field.
49:41 If we left a lunch bag,
49:44 we failed the course, you know? And when I worked in the field doing field geology for Shell and international nickel and other thing, we took care of our environment and we policed the grounds
49:58 afterwards. And sure, we had to dig holes. And sure, there would be slack heaps and things like that. And sure, in the old days, maybe people weren't as careful or concerned or took care of
50:10 things as they do. But times have changed. And I don't think that the general public appreciates that. And I think that's the biggest misconception is that we don't care about the earth. And in
50:24 fact, we really do probably more than they do. That was a great answer. I know. That was a lot of beautiful. Do you have an embarrassing story that has happened in your career? Oh man, do I
50:29 have any better?
50:40 Tons and tons of embarrassing stories. Give us your best one. Ooh, you didn't prep me for this. So I'll have to think, okay, I'll tell you one that still haunts me to this day. I'm excited.
50:57 And it's not salacious, it's just a technical error that I made. So when I was in, I guess probably I'd finished third year university as a geologist, chief as a student, but I was working
51:14 underground in Sudbury at a little mine called the Little Stobie Mine, which is a copper nickel, zinc, silver, whatever mine. And I was there as a mine geologist for the summer. And this
51:31 researcher,
51:34 well, Sudbury is a meteorite creator is a is a meteorite creature. Okay, so a large
51:42 meteor. I think it's the third or fourth largest meteorite crater that we know in the world. And what happened is this meteorite hit into the earth and it created cracks that go down and allowed the
51:57 mantle or the molten part of the rock to come up into the earth. And all of that molten lava contains the copper nickels in gold that we mine. And so it formed a bowl, like what your stepfather
52:15 gave you, but a big and we're talking tens, 20, 100 miles across. But wow, just a little bit bigger. All of the mines are along the edge of the bowl where these cracks came up. So this
52:27 professor, back to my story, the professor wanted to do some work on the meteorite impact to figure out the angle that the meteor came in and And so he needed to have samples that showed the dip,
52:45 the attitude of these fractures in the earth. So he needed to know what they're, what we call the strike, but the direction north-south and the dip, the inclination. And he asked if we could
52:60 collect samples of these fractures and send them oriented samples So they sent me with a bag and I went down into the mine, I was used to going down into the mine to collect samples of these
53:17 particular fractures. And to collect the samples you had to know the direction so you'd mark with a marker on the side of the rock, the strike, the direction it was pointing. And then you were
53:32 supposed to mark the dip so that you would know the inclination and I forgot. dips. And I spent a whole week gathering rocks, carrying them to the surface. And when my boss, the mind geologist
53:50 looked at it, he said, where's the dip? And I'm a third year student, I should know better. And so then here's the embarrassing part. He said, well, we can't take the time to go do this again.
54:03 So we'll just draw some dip lines on it.
54:07 So we just drew the dip lines on it. And we sent it off to this poor professor. Oh, no. Who probably has research had when he put his work altogether said, well, this doesn't make any sense
54:21 whatsoever. He's like scratching his head like what is wrong? I mean, maybe even the fire. Oh, my gosh. Or lost his grant or this PhD student failed. Oh, no. And that was all my fault. I
54:34 hope he listens to me, and he's like, oh my gosh. Not experience everything. Not experience everything. That's a good one, that's a very technical. It's a very interesting - I'm the pick during
54:47 this person opening that, like having the rocks and just being like,
54:51 this is what - No, it would take him a while to figure it out. It would take him a while. He'd have to pull it all out. Yeah, 'cause it would look like it was right. It would look real, that's
54:57 right.
54:60 And that just - Did y'all try to, like, with the dips, did you try to, like - Best we could.
55:07 Yeah, best we could, but it was pretty much a cluster.
55:13 So, and I will tell you, seriously, I still, on occasion, wake up at night and say, Oh, that was a terrible thing I did. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, man.
55:26 That's funny. Yeah. You want to wrap us up?
55:30 Yes. Thank you Yes, thank you for coming on. We. I love this episode. I enjoy all the geology talk, even though most people think it's boring. I think y'all are really cool.
55:45 And no, we really appreciate you coming on. And if people wanna find you, where can they learn more? Are you on LinkedIn? I'm on LinkedIn, as at Peter M, probably Peter M, Duncan, or maybe
55:56 just Peter Duncan. But I'm also, we have our company website is microsizeminkcom
56:03 And on the website, there is a little button you can push, they may have hidden it now, but since the beginning, there's always been a button there that said ask Peter. Oh, hello. And you click
56:14 on it and it fires up an email, and you can even be anonymous. Oh, wow, that's actually really cool. That is cool. I love that. Well, you have to be out there for people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
56:26 Well, thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Do we have any other announcements? Fuse views we actually will be talking about um. oil and gas technology enabling geothermal everywhere. So it
56:37 goes right along with what you're doing. We will also have a CCUS panel. Lots of good information. So Fuse is October 30 and 31st. Buy your tickets. Buy your digital wildcatterscom. I've already
56:54 signed up. Have a look. Yay! We'll see you there. We'll see you there. We'll see you there. See you there. All right, until next time.
