Oil & Gas News

Petrel - Isatis link, a real success

PETREL™ (reservoir modeling package from Schlumberger) has now import and export interfaces which offer easy access to the full capabilities of ISATIS. Several of our customers have already adopted this new link with success. You may acquire it from GEOVARIANCES. Contact Patrick Magne for more info.

Technology Partnership with LANDMARK

In a move to bring enhanced earth-modeling technology to the E&P industry, LANDMARK signed an exclusive technology partnership agreement with GEOVARIANCES in June 2007.
LANDMARK will incorporate ISATIS geostatistical algorithms opening the door to a variety of state-of-the-art functions that include both classic methodologies and innovations.

Training Partnership with GEONEURALE, Germany

GeoNeurale has been calling on our Geostatistics Expert Jacques Deraisme to conduct specific training sessions. First session was organized last November and described the fundamental role that geostatistics can play in Reservoir Characterization for Geothermal Exploration. It was a real success with attendees coming from Daewoo, ParadigmGeo Mexico, Statoil, RWE  Africa, University of Leicester. A new session on Geostatistics for Sub-surface Analysis aiming at exploring the seismic and petrophysical interaction is scheduled from Jan. 14 to 18 in Munich.

New training sessions in Calgary

GEOVARIANCES is organizing a specific training session in Calgary beginning of next year, (Jan.21-Feb.1). This course covers all aspects of geostatistics for the Oil & Gas Industry, from basics to reservoir characterization. This session is already a success with about 20 registered people from Chevron, Conoco and Petro-Canada.

Mining News

News from M2RC - Multivariate Recoverable Resources Consortium

Most of the partners met together in Paris in December 2007 to review the final outcomes of the M2RC research and development. It turns out that the consortium has successfully reached its objectives with new functionalities implemented in ISATIS v.8. Given this success, partners agreed to extend the consortium a third year turning new research and developments towards domaining issues.

Success Story - Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) in Brazil is using ISATIS for auditing their resources

ISATIS played an important role in the audit process in CSN. The main challenge was to implement the software in a very strict deadline so that the whole process would be ready to be audited. It was a 6-month period of training, eventually leading to the successful achievement of proper and consistent results.

Undoubted success for our last training course in Santiago de Chile

In 2007, GEOVARIANCES has been organizing public geostatistics workshops all over the world for the mining industry (Australia, South-Africa, Canada, South-America). The last one in Santiago de Chile was a real success with people coming from Codelco, Vale (ex. CVRD) and Ferrous Resources do Brazil. In 2008, GEOVARIANCES is extending this experience by organizing on-site mentoring sessions where attendees will practice Geostatistics and ISATIS on their own datasets. For more information, please contact Julien Tan.

They join the ISATIS Users Community

Rio Tinto acquired additional ISATIS licenses for the Simandou Project in Guinea and the Northpark Mines (NPM) in Australia, Codelco for its Norte-Chuquicamata and El Teniente divisions, Goldfields for its Sociedad Minera la Cima in Lima and Denver, BHP for Cerro Matoso SA (CMSA) in Colombia. Besides, two consulting companies in Australia Oxiana and Geostat Service have acquired ISATIS to offer their clients the cutting-edge of technology.

Environment News

2007, a Busy Year for our Consultants

Many studies have been carried out in the domain of soil pollution (TOTAL Dépôts Passifs, GAZ DE FRANCE, CEA). Indeed, it is crucial to base remediation strategies on accurate estimates of contaminated volumes and their attached uncertainties.
GEOVARIANCES has been producing daily maps of atmospheric ozone and nitrogen dioxyde pollution for now 3 years for ADEME (Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Energie), the French agency for environment and energy control. Starting from spring 2008, PM10 pollution will be integrated to the automated procedure. Resulting maps may be visualized on ATMONET internet website.
IFREMER (Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer), the French public institute for marine research, has committed GEOVARIANCES for producing a numeric bathymetry model of the entire Atlantic shoreline.

Public Health, a New Sector of Activity for Geovariances

GEOVARIANCES has organized an in-house training session for InVS (Institut de Veille Sanitaire), the French institute for health monitoring. Characterizing health risks and analyzing the correlation between environmental factors and health impacts indeed benefit from the integration of spatial statistics and geostatistics: identifying anomalous clusters, mapping relative risk, etc.  

They join the ISATIS Users Community

the Geological Survey of Finland in Espoo (GTK) bought ISATIS to deal with 3D geostatistical, geological and geophysical modeling of subsurface structures in Finland. They are also using ISATIS for teaching purposes.
AIR-APS in Chambery (France) has joined the AASQA community (Agences Agréées pour la Surveillance de la Qualité de l’Air), the associations in charge of the air quality monitoring, which already use ISATIS to compute accurate and reliable maps of air pollutants.
NERSC, the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, has acquired ISATIS to apply non-stationary kriging methods to oceanography bathymetry issues.
CEGUM, the Research Center for Geography in Metz (France), purchased ISATIS for teaching geostatistics at the university and for academic research.

Staff News

Welcome to Benjamin, Patrick, Ophélie, Matthieu, François, Jean-Yves & Yvon!

GEOVARIANCES staff 2007 fast growing answers a strong demand for consulting and training services from our clients all over the world, whether they come from the Mining sector, the Environment sector or the Oil & Gas sector. Besides, because our mid-term strategy is to supply the market with a new generation of geostatistical software solution, GEOVARIANCES is strengthening the software development team.

From left to right:
Benjamin Martin has joined the software development team last October. He graduated from a master in Mathematics and Computing.
Patrick Magne is our sales manager for the Oil & Gas industry. He has joined GEOVARIANCES in February 2007 after more than 20 years in the aeronautics industry, among which several ones in the numerical simulation part.
Ophélie Lemarchand has been hired as Junior Consultant working for the Environment activity of GEOVARIANCES. After being graduated with a master in mathematical engineering, she spent 6 months in a French association for Air Quality Monitoring where she worked on ozone pollution mapping using ISATIS.
Matthieu Bourges has been hired as Junior Consultant working for the Oil & Gas activity of GEOVARIANCES. He is engineer graduated from the French "Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Géologie" where he has got specialized in hydrodynamics and reservoir engineering.
François Geffroy has joined GEOVARIANCES almost one year ago as software development manager after 25 years spent at the Center for Geostatistics of the Paris School of Mine (CG). At the CG, he has been successfully involved in the development of BLUEPACK, GEOSMINE, HERESIM 3D, ISATIS. During the last years, he specifically worked on the facies simulation techniques: boolean, plurigaussian, fluvial channel deposit simulation.
Jean-Yves Marin (not in the picture) has joined GEOVARIANCES development team last October. He is doing a degree in software programming combined with work experience.
Yvon Desnoyers (not in the picture) is the last to join us after 6 months working for CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique), the French government-funded technological research organisation. Yvon is now preparing a PhD on "Geostatistical characterization of industrial pollution. The case of radiologic contamination in former nuclear plants." involving CEA, the Center for Geostatistics of Fontainebleau and GEOVARIANCES.

Bye bye Régine

2007 has been sadly marked by the death of Régine Broggi who was GEOVARIANCES Deputy Managing Director for the last three years. All in GEOVARIANCES valued Régine for her dynamism, willpower, receptiveness, spontaneity.
We all miss her...