40 Years of Geostatistics

ISATIS is the result of 40 years of experience in industrial applications and applied research in geostatistics for the oil & gas and mining industries, as well as more recently, for environmental issues.
Today, ISATIS is widely used the world over by more than 250 private oil & gas companies, consultancy teams, mining corporations & environmental agencies, and benefits from the expertise of a broad network of research centers.

1967. Pr. G. Matheron established Geostatistics at “Ecole des Mines de Paris” and set up the “Centre de Géostatistique” in Fontainebleau.

1978. Birth of Bluepack in response to the need for accurate 2D contour maps in the oil industry. It included advanced techniques for time-to-depth conversion using seismic attributes and well data.

1980. First release of Magma which brought together a complete set of geostatistical tools and an efficient 2D and 3D data management. Magma already contained most of the available kriging and simulation techniques for carrying out 3D stochastic geological modeling.

1986. Geovariances was founded to market Magma worldwide to an industrial clientele. Total, Exxon, Shell, British Petroleum, Agip, Amoco, Gaz de France for the oil industry, Genmin, CVRD, Impala, MBR for the mining industry, Ifremer for oceanology, ... were among our first users.

1993. First release of ISATIS, Geovariances’ leading product, which offered in one integrated and user-friendly package all the techniques previously available in Magma and Bluepack, merging 2D and 3D approaches.

1994. Advanced stochastic simulation techniques were implemented in ISATIS to address an overwhelming need for a better assessment of the uncertainties.

1996. Faults appeared in ISATIS.

1997. First version for Windows operating system.

1998. ISATOIL provided an original, global, multi-layer approach for building a consistent 3D stacked sequence.

2000. Polygons were designed in ISATIS for global estimation.

2002. First version for Linux operating system.

2003. Direct links between ISATIS and the most popular integrated reservoir characterization systems such as Gocad (Earth Decision Sciences) and the RML (Beicip Franlab) allowed integrating geostatistics into conventional earth modeling procedures.

2004. Plurigaussian simulations were implemented in ISATIS to respond to a growing need for modeling very complex reservoir geology.

2004. Direct links between ISATIS and standard mining packages such as Gems (Gemcom) and Datamine (Datamine) allowed efficiently combining geology modeling with advanced and powerful geostatistics.

Geovariances continuously adapts and updates Isatis to the needs and the evolution of the market. Through an exclusive agreement with the “Centre de Géostatistique”, Geovariances keeps ISATIS at the cutting edge of technology by incorporating the latest developments in geostatistics.