EarthWorks Overview

Intelligent-Integration

Complete Package

Single Integrated Solution

Seismic Analysis

Prestack Advantage

Geological Integration

Visualization & Mapping

Genetek Earth Research Corporation is a software developer that has built the EarthWorks Exploration System. EarthWorks is a seismic and geological exploration workstation based on a new real-time design that can increase your geoscientists’ productivity, reduce your risk and lower finding costs.

Design Philosophy

Genetek Earth Research built EarthWorks with a blue-sky attitude, without the need to preserve old software. Our design specification was to build a flexible system that would perform and be actively developed for decades.

EarthWorks is not a traditional workstation. Data and applications are integrated at an unprecedented level. Powerful facilities such as prestack visualization are seamlessly implemented into a system with practically every analytical tool you need to evaluate prospects.

We pioneered Active Visualization technology that includes real-time, live-linked and intelligently-integrated design. This technology takes advantage of high-performance 64-bit hardware in order to make geoscience analyses come alive with motion. EarthWorks is not just another workstation; this becomes clear within minutes of use.

The EarthWorks design specification ambitiously reaches for the maximum capability current 64-bit systems can provide. We are building software to make use of tomorrow’s machines, always squeezing as much information from the data as possible because we know this subsurface information may save or make your company millions of dollars.

EarthWorks blends advanced seismic analysis and modeling features with powerful visualization facilities. It joins seismic interpretation technology with seismic processing technology. It bridges geophysical analysis with geological analysis. It is built for advanced use by both geologists and geophysicists. EarthWorks is built by explorationists who are on a mission to build the best geoscience workstation in the world!

Real-Time

Real-time design powers EarthWorks to unparalleled levels of performance. It animates seismic and geological analyses and enables visualizations to come alive. Imagine focusing seismic data to reveal geological features as easy as focusing a camera lens.

Picking Horizons using Real-Time Spectral Analysis Tools

Have you ever had to pick a horizon through a noisy portion of seismic data? We all have done it, perhaps by switching to manual picking and pushing the event through where we think it goes. With EarthWorks, you can easily filter a zone and then pick the filtered, noise reduced event in real-time with instant Spectral Picking.

Simply drag out a spectral analysis zone and filter back with mouse driven sliders until your horizon becomes coherent and then pick the locally filtered event. You can apply this technique with phase rotation and spectral enhancement too. Imagine imaging the event with even better accuracy by picking on a filtered partial stack, all in real-time. Real-time technology like this is embedded in every aspect of EarthWorks.

When geoscientists see the EarthWorks Exploration System, they immediately see the powerful advantages of real-time design. Current interpretation techniques of “pick-post-map” are over 40 years old.

EarthWorks provides real-time tools to extract much more information from seismic data as it is the only system that can evaluate spectral characteristics and prestack seismic responses in real-time. This gives your company the competitive advantage.

Live-Linked

Live-linking means that different applications are linked together in real-time. For example, when a geoscientist picks a seismic horizon, his map surface is updated with new gridding, contours and visualization. Even if this map is a time-depth conversion, the visualization is updated in real-time, without user direction. Better, more consistent prospects are generated faster using this live-linked technology.

Intelligently-Integrated

So many systems call themselves integrated that it has become a cliché in our industry. However, what they mean when they say they are integrated is typically file-based integration. This requires an export-import cycle to move the data file where it is needed. Building synthetics is a typical scenario. You launch the synthetics application, create a suite of synthetics, and export the files. Then, back in the seismic interpretation application, you must import the synthetics where you paste the image onto your section.

This is not what we call intelligent-integration such as that found in EarthWorks. Synthetics are built live, by clicking on the well symbol, while you’re interpreting your seismic section. You can adjust the wavelet used in the synthetic and drag the synthetic anywhere in the project. Intelligent-integration simplifies your workflow and allows you to concentrate on subsurface evaluation. Intelligent-integration allows you to keep your creative momentum moving forward in order to generate successful prospects in the least amount of time.

Seismic Analysis

EarthWorks was designed and written by geophysicists, so it naturally is strong as a seismic interpretation system. EarthWorks is complete with advanced real-time synthetics, modeling, line tying, seismic visualizations, stratigraphic mark-up, spectral analysis, complex attributes. These are features expected of every workstation.

However, EarthWorks is also the first interpretive processing workstation. This means it can handle prestack data, enabling you to interpret prestack traces during your regular interpretation workflow. This, and other unique real-time features makes EarthWorks the next-generation workstation on which you will want to build your prospects.

Prestack Advantage

Seismic sections that most geoscientists interpret are made up of stacked seismic traces. Each trace on the stacked section is actually the average of dozens of other seismic traces. These raw seismic traces that are averaged is called the prestack data. Seismic data processors apply the averaging process or stacking, before they give you the final stacked sections. As with most averaging, if you don’t know what the original data looks like, you can’t trust the average either.

Every seismic section has seismic artifacts. These are seismic anomalies that are side effects of seismic acquisition and processing. These anomalies are not related to geological features. Analyzing prestack data enables you to differentiate between seismic artifacts and true geology. Without looking at the prestack data, you usually can’t tell the difference. Prestack analysis can help you improve your drilling success.

Azimuthal Gather and AVO Analysis

Analyzing prestack data allows you to evaluate the seismic processing quality. This helps you to better estimate confidence in your interpretation. Better risk assessment can improve the success of your prospect portfolio.

Prestack data analysis is integrated with AVO analysis. AVO anomalies can help identify petrophysical signatures. EarthWorks has integrated AVO analysis which allows you to quickly scan for AVO anomalies, during your regular interpretation workflow. AVO visualization allows you to search for AVO anomalies before picking any events. EarthWorks AVO features allow you to evaluate every one of your datasets for AVO anomalies right on your desktop. EarthWorks eliminates the need to contract AVO processing on each prospect.

Partial Offset and Difference Stacking

Prestack analysis adds a new dimension to seismic data derived geological insight. Many top geoscientists agree that integrating real-time prestack analysis to exploration workstations is revolutionary geoscience technology.

Geological Integration

Our geological toolset is developing with real-time design, just like the seismic interpretation tools. For example, geoscientists can view well curves in 3D space, pick well tops and map these in real-time. Additionally, they can adjust sand-shale lines on well curves and watch their integrated sand maps appear dynamically.

Sand-Shale Curve Calibration and Map Visualization

Composite well-seismic traverses enable geoscientists to build cross-sections that are combinations of seismic data and well curves. More developments are planned, which will provide a single workstation that both geologists and geophysicists can use with equal real-time effectiveness.

Visualization & Mapping

EarthWorks mapping system is also our visualization tool. Every map built is also visualized in 3D space. Having a real-time visualization enables users to fully interact with the visualization.

Event imaging allows you to visualize 2D and 3D datasets in 3D space, to see how seismic features are spatially distributed. Combined with prestack data and AVO analyses, EarthWorks can help you find geologically shaped AVO anomalies before any horizon is even picked.

Event Imaging of Seismic Data

Visualizations may also be back-projected to seismic sections to show where seismic events and fault planes should be expected. Constant visualization enables multi-Z picking in overthrust areas a simple task to accomplish.

Project Management

EarthWorks provides project management facilities to keep project data organized effectively. Backup tools enable geoscientists to automatically perform backups at regular intervals. Datasets can be imported from other targeted workstations.

Projects may be moved around using hot-swappable disk technology, without shutting down the system or EarthWorks. Project management tools allow you to easily specify the location of the new project.

Projects can be split up based on geographic boundaries and copied to a new disk location. New versions of EarthWorks can be downloaded by the geoscientists with the click of a button in less than a few minutes. Project files may be quickly uploaded for Genetek support with another button click. We have built EarthWorks to be simple to use and simple to maintain.

Data Loading

Data loading includes the loading of SEG-Y stack and prestack data sets, well locations, well curves, tops and deviations, graphic overlays such as geographic grids, lease plots, topography, culture and pipelines. Data loading is easy that even non-technical geoscientists can understand. It is so easy that a consultant geoscientist loaded hundreds of 2D lines and a 3D survey without any formal training.

Preservation of intellectual property is built-in to EarthWorks. For example, when seismic data is loaded, the EBCDIC header is saved with the line audit. When the user modifies the line by filtering or spectrally enhancing, these details are added to the updated line audit record. The audit record may be edited by the interpreter to add his own comments. In this way, old projects can be retrieved with complete descriptions from the past geoscientists.

Complete Package

EarthWorks is a complete and highly-integrated system. It includes all of the facilities necessary for prospect analysis in a single, consistent system. This is unlike most software packages that are niche products designed to cooperate with the large “integrated” workstations. There are so many niche software packages that geoscientists spend a great deal of their time learning and switching between applications.

The competitive niche software is poorly integrated, demonstrating only file-based integration. This means users are forced to constantly export-import data. It’s a cycle that robs users of precious time that could be used for prospect analysis.

EarthWorks is a complete system that communicates in real-time with its applications. For example, when a user picks seismic data, his map automatically updates by gridding, contouring and visualizing his newly modified horizon. This live-linking is effective even if the geoscientist is imaging a time-depth converted surface, allowing him to interpret in depth on-the-fly. Compared to conventional workstations, the geoscientist has increased his productivity by at least twenty. Most importantly, live-linking enables geoscientists to analyze the subsurface with much better understanding.

Real-time EarthWorks facilities include seismic picking, posting, mapping, gridding, contouring, synthetic generation, modeling, spectral analysis and enhancement, spectral and spatial line ties, prestack analysis including computed supergather displays, offset and azimuthally dependent partial stacks, AVO analysis, 2+3D visualization, flash volume 3D picking, time-to-depth conversion with velocity and depth sculpting, fault analysis and fault association with back projection, stratigraphic mark-up tools with seismic markers, seismic section flattening, visualized line tie analysis, multi-Z picking for overthrust areas, sand-shale well curve calibration and more.

Single Integrated Solution

EarthWorks is a complete system that can simplify and reduce your software count significantly. EarthWorks can replace your synthetics, picking, visualization, AVO, modeling and mapping systems, to name just a few. More importantly, EarthWorks provides these tools in a single integrated package that is easy to use. If tools are easy to use and are consistently built, then geoscientists will use them regularly. How many add-on software packages are getting regular use in your company? Chances are, you have many software packages that are rarely used.

EarthWorks can help rationalize your software suite as well as greatly reduce the amount of support resources required. For each different software package, there’s a maintenance, training, support and management resource expended. EarthWorks requires virtually no support from your IT group which means it has a very low Total Cost of Ownership.

Ease of Use

We have had geoscientists learn to use EarthWorks after a single demonstration. Consulting geoscientists have loaded and interpreted integrated 2D and 3D projects in less than 2 weeks, without any formal training. EarthWorks is easy to use because its workflow is streamlined and logical for explorationists. It was designed and built by seismic interpreters with years of exploration experience, so it is natural that the interface makes sense to oil and gas finders.

Additionally, the software is developed with a single style and consistent vision. The user interface is consistent which means that once you learn how to use one function, you know how to approach almost every other function. Compared to other workstations that are a collection of acquired software from hundreds of different developers, EarthWorks is a breeze to learn.

EarthWorks is transparent software. We don’t use parameters that are difficult to understand or meaningless to the average geoscientist. On most workstations, it takes years or decades to become an “expert” user. With EarthWorks, the step between novice and expert is an extremely small one. We want all of our users to make full use of our advanced real-time technology.

Vendor Stability

You may be concerned about the stability of Genetek Earth Research. You may not have heard of this small company and are worried about how long it will last. Be assured, Genetek Earth Research is one of the most stable software vendors in the industry.

Genetek is not controlled by venture capitalists or similarly minded investors. Consequently, no one except its founder can sell it out. Typically, software companies are built by Technical Visionaries that are backed with millions of dollars invested by Venture Capitalists who want to quickly make a 30% return on their investment. Once the new technology company reaches a certain level of success, the Big Software Companies (BSCs) buy them out to take over the competition. The BSCs have lots of cash to make the venture capitalists happy and so they are more than willing to sell. The Technical Visionaries also get their big paycheck and often retire from the business at this point. Occasionally, they get taken on with the BSC, but usually find the environment too stifling to remain effective. Eventually, the product gets “integrated” with the BSC product line, but no new major developments are forthcoming. The Technical Visionary is gone, the imagination and drive depleted, support and responsiveness dries up; the software languishes. The original clients are left with still born software.

Genetek Earth Research has seen this software cycle many times and does not intend to follow in these footsteps of failure. We have outlasted companies and entities many times our size and our product has lived longer than others that had many more developers involved. We have 16 years of successful software development, always moving in the same direction: forward towards building the best geoscience workstation in the world.

Genetek Earth Research will be there when you decide that you want your geoscientists to have the latest technology in the easiest to use package from the most responsive geoscience software developer in the world.

Responsive

All of our clients have seen us develop software for them inside 24 hours. We can accomplish this because we have written and understand every line of code in EarthWorks. Unlike our competitor’s systems, ours is not software cobbled together from multiple developers. This gives us the ability to provide immediate response to your software needs.

When was the last time you asked your software developer for enhancements? Chances are that it took a long time to get your suggestion built or it never was incorporated at all. Many users don’t even bother to ask for changes anymore, resigning themselves to the fact that their suggestions don’t matter to the software vendor anymore.

At Genetek Earth Research, we actively grow EarthWorks with suggestions from our clients. If the suggestion is a useful addition to EarthWorks, you can explain it and it can be implemented without cluttering EarthWorks’ streamlined design, then we can build it.

Active Development

Many geoscience software packages are basically dead. The software vendors spend minimal resources to keep it maintained, but major new developments are rare. New developments usually come in the form of a newly acquired software companies products. “Innovation through acquisition” is what we call it. Often no one has the expertise to modify the core software application, as all of the original software developers have long gone. With the intellectual capital depleted, the software vendor’s goal is to keep the software going as long as possible in order to derive the most maintenance and sales revenue it can.

At Genetek Earth Research, we are still actively developing new technology as quickly as we were 16 years ago. Many top geoscientists consider our system to be the best geoscience workstation in the industry. We got here because we’ve listened to our clients.

Most companies have eliminated their Research and Development departments, leaving most of this up to universities and service companies. At Genetek Earth Research, we can act as a client’s R&D department, quickly building software that can provide companies with new exploration techniques.

Often companies switch workstations every 3-5 years, because their software developer has fallen behind or is no longer responsive. Genetek Earth Research actively builds new technology so that after 3 years, you no longer have the same software you originally licensed. Your needs have changed, you conveyed that to Genetek, and we’ve developed it in your direction. We’re constantly building your dream machine, so that we hope you won’t ever need to consider changing again. This keeps EarthWorks on the leading geoscience edge.

Do you think it's time to advance beyond the simple pick, post and map interpretations you've been doing for the last 20 years? EarthWorks is the next generation workstation for you!