1.1.1 Subsurface Workflow Challenges

The exploration and production (E&P) subsurface workflow is lengthy, iterative, and complex. It involves many people from different disciplines, sometimes different companies, and use of many different software packages for complex analysis, interpretation, modeling, and simulation.

This multi-discipline, multi-company, multi-software environment is iterative and requires users to move data back and forth between different software packages. Many of these packages use different data formats—often proprietary and incompatible.

This inherently complex process and inability to easily exchange data means E&P companies and their people face challenges that include: knowledge loss, rigid workflows, difficulty characterizing and sharing uncertainty, data loss, and productivity loss.