A comprehensive web-based atlas is now available, offering a geoscience, engineering and economic analysis of fields in production and many others under-going development. This is a collabor-ative venture between PGS Reservoir (UK) and The Netherlands Institute of Applied Geoscience TNO - National Geological Survey (NITG-TNO)
PGS introduced its first North Sea atlas in hard copy form in 1989. NITG-TNO's Depart-ment of Geo-Information Systems then developed an Oracle8-based database to translate the data into a digital format. The Oracle web application provides access to this data - which covers fields offshore Ireland as well as those in the Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and UK sectors - via a simple Internet browser such as Netscape Communicator.
Each field is fully described in terms of local setting, reservoir characteristics, stratigraphy and structure, sedimentology and depositional environment, reservoir geology, pressure and fluid properties. Commercial data outlined include production profiles, project capital costs, full-field life economic indicators and cash-flow. Information on the service can be found at www.nitg.tno.nl/webatlas.
TNO-NITG also coordinated the recent North West European Gas Atlas study, sponsored by the European Union. One of its conclusions was that Westphalian and pre-Westphalian marine source rocks may contribute to hydrocarbon reservoirs in the southern North Sea. This year, TNO-NITG is investigating these potential plays in collaboration with several major E&P companies.
A third, long-established atlas was also made available online recently. One of TNO-NITG's main services is the mapping of the deep subsurface of The Netherlands, up to a depth of 5,000 meters, at a scale of 1:250,000. Data has been amassed over the years in digital form - the horizons mapped were used to construct a volumetrically consistent stratigraphic model for use as a 3D atlas. The newly digitized data, available free of charge, includes boreholes and locations of seismic interpretations, horizons, fault lines and sub-crop lines.
TNO-NITG also designed a three-dimensional viewer in Java 3D, which can be run on any computer for interactively viewing the Dutch subsurface digital atlas. Work also started recently on a fully offshore (The Netherlands) subsurface atlas, and this should be available by 2003. TNO-NITG has ambitions for a further Atlas covering the Caspian Sea, in collaboration with PGS.
