Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

Shell Oil had a Cray 1 and an ncube when I worked there in 1989. Chevron had a Cray 1 and a raft of IBM mainframes in 1990. Chevron's DC was set up for visitors so every cluster had a sign describing the computing power for that system. Total compute power was very important because it meant they could do more analysis on seismic data to refine their oil and gas lease bids.

Chevron had so much seismic data they required (from memory) six robot tape libraries. They were ganged together so the picker robots could hand tapes between cabinets in case all drives in a given cabinet were in use. It was cool as hell to watch the camera mounted right above the picker flying around this dark wall of tapes to go grab one.

One of Shell's Quality training videos was about The Guy Who Lost The Tape; seems a seismic data tape was mislabeled and lost, causing Shell issues with bidding on a lease. Their Deming-style quality training was all about preventing that sort of thing happening again. I dare say their data was more valuable in total than the hardware.

If you knew the effort and cost that goes into large scale near and offshore seismic and non-seismic surveys then you wouldn't think twice about putting the value of the data well above the value of the hardware.

Offshore deepwater (~2500ft+) non-seismic surveys might cost 6-7 figures per day to operate, and might fill up a hard drive every 1-3 days.

Depending on how many drives fit on a tape, the raw data could get very expensive, very quickly, even before it's been processed, analyzed, etc.

Absolutely and of course the opportunity cost from missing out on a lucrative oil field could buy a room full of compute.

It's even worse than that.

I used to work with a guy who told me that the reason BP bought Amoco, and not the other way around, is that years before, the Amoco team misread the seismic map (not the chart), and bid on the wrong piece of land. BP got the other piece, and the difference was big enough that within a decade, one bought the other.

THAT is how much the data is worth.

I suspect the value of the seismic data keeps better over time than the value of the hardware, too.

Better than the hardware, certainly. But advances in surveying technology make new surveys worthwhile, occasionally, so the data does have a lifespan. Of course better analysis techniques or more powerful hardware for old data makes a big difference too.

Sure, adding more data is also good. Often new data can make the old data more valuable, too, I'd guess?

Yes, although it's not usually a case of doing the same thing with new tech and getting better results. You'd have to have some hint that oil might be there from the first survey.

But my experience is mostly not-seismic, so I'm not sure how the survey parameters would be adjusted for a revisit.

Do you have any good resources on that Deming-style quality training?

Deming refers to Edward Deming [1], and there is a W. Edward Deming Institute that still teaches his principles. [2] Since that was 30 years ago I doubt they still have the same training material today, but I wouldn't have the rights to share it even if it was the same, sorry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

[2] https://deming.org/

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