march 2009 issue

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The Geo Beat

That First Job and its Mentoring Message

BY TOM SNEDDON, P.GEOL.
APEGGA Manager, Geoscience Affairs

This month, I would like to address my missive to you more mature geoscientists out there. You know who you are. The guys and gals with monochromatic hair and wrinkles above the eyebrows are the ones I mean. What was your first job? I mean, real job: the one that launched your career?

Mine was with a firm that a lot of oilpatch folk have fond memories of — Pan American Petroleum Corporation. Pan Am, or Pandemonium Petroleum as some jokingly called it, begat Amoco in the late 1960s and most people will remember it by that name. For the edification of any newbies, Amoco disappeared into BP Canada in 1998.

It had a truly great training process for everyone who hired on. Some said it was too good, as many of the company’s recruits went on to become executives for competing companies. There were courses on technical topics, but the strength of the process was cross-training; it’s a concept that fell out of favour in the 1980s when oil companies ceased doing everything in-house.

During the critical first couple of years, a trainee had the opportunity to work in every shop around the company that supported that person’s responsibilities.

My first job was entitled geophysical professional assistant. Nowadays the label would be seismic processor, but this was in pre-computer times when the job had a much broader set of duties.

There was a lot more manual labour involved then, including computing corrections by hand. Or more accurately, corrections were computed in your head from analog-recorded, real-time field records. This process forced one to become very intimate with the data.

It also forced one to fully understand and appreciate the geophysical principles behind those corrections, which took your humble scribe quite a while to internalize, being a closet arithmophobe in those days. It also sensitized one to the consequences of screwing up when extracting data points from field records and field notes.

It was possible in those days as well to deal directly with the crew in the field, if something didn’t make sense or the field notes were ambiguous. It took a lot longer to shoot a program, and communications between the office and the field seemed a lot closer then, despite the rather primitive technology of the time (phone booths, sort of like sheds with phones in them). The pace was a lot slower, although it didn’t seem like it then.

Tables of hand-transcribed corrections were translated into aluminum plates for the playback machine, which was really an analog computer (yes, dear newbies, there is such a thing and they actually worked quite well). The geophysicist in charge worked out which filters were to be switched in (physically, filters composed of discrete inductors, capacitors and resistors) and at what point in the record to get the most interpretable section.

The filter characteristics were derived from experimentation in the field (geophysicists went into the field in those days, sometimes for weeks at a stretch), using a heap of geophones at one spot to produce a peculiar looking record known as a wave cable. And the result was a 100 per cent section printed on photographic paper, one trace at a time.

Later versions of the system allowed compositing records by physically playing back the common signals on top of each other. This was quickly superseded by the introduction of digital computers in the mid-1960s, which did all that automatically and, incidentally, produced much better looking sections.

To do all that stuff by hand meant having a senior professional assistant teach the trainee how to do each of the many steps individually and supervise the work closely until performance became automatic and as close to error-free as humanly possible. With the introduction of digital computers, the same attention to detail produced a lot more sections a lot faster. It also meant the infrequent errors produced much more spectacular results.

Supporting functions included drafting, photography and printing, as every section and map was plotted manually then photographed to allow it to be easily reproduced in numbers sufficient to satisfy company and government needs. Reproduction also allowed the geophysicists to err occasionally as well. Since well control was sparse, many an interpretation bust occurred before the prospect was very well understood.

The relationship between the processor and the geophysicist was by necessity much closer as well. The geophysicist needed to be certain the section had been assembled properly and filter functions were properly computed and applied correctly.

Because the processing procedures were intensely time and labour consuming, it was extremely important it was done correctly the first time. I learned a lot of geophysics and electronics that way, with one-on-one tutoring from some pretty bright, experienced and knowledgeable professionals. The mentoring part of training was built-in by its nature and few people gave it any second thought.

Life on the job for the trainee is much more complex today in many ways. First, the industry has become highly fragmented: 50 or more companies may be involved with a program, with a cast of hundreds of people coming and going over the data acquisition, front-end processing and data interpretation phases of activity.

Continuity through an entire program is unlikely, even at the professional level. It is very difficult for a geoscientist-in-training to get the whole picture in focus, let alone being able to work for some period of time at each task to fully understand it and appreciate the contribution of the people who do it every day.

Getting up close and intimate with the numbers is logistically impossible, given the vast number of data points collected in any given program. Data aggregation is the name of the game, and work must necessarily begin at the appropriate level of aggregation. Purists may call it data aggravation.

How can the modern geoscientist-in-training even begin to understand and cope with the inherent complexity of exploration in the 21st century? It is only possible through mentoring. Someone, somewhere has to take the time to explain things and to suggest ways of coming to grips with the processes of geoscience and the industry as a whole.

Universities are having trouble finding enough time to stuff all the fundamental theory into a pitifully few courses over a short four-year period. The breadth of geoscience has become so great that achieving any useful level of depth in each topic is a serious problem.

We cannot look to universities for any help with more than an introduction to professional training. That can only happen after graduation, on the job.

Which brings us back to my afore-mentioned first job. It takes four years to turn a raw graduate into an independent professional geoscientist. Four years of carefully thought-through mentoring and on-the-job training. Who is responsible for ensuring the new recruits become the seasoned veterans in your organization?

Maybe it should be you.