Huge, Huge, Huge: Disruptive Technology To Increase Oil Production

Link here.

Then re-acquaint yourself with this story which has been posted "forever" on this blog.

Now, remind yourself that UND has, perhaps, the best library of oil cores in the world (of course, limited to North Dakota and the Williston Basin).

That should be enough to get you started, but if you are an investor, think about this:

• Continental Resources is either the operator or a non-operator partner on every sixth well drilled in North Dakota
• To get to the Bakken, a driller needs to drill through several payzones in the Williston Basin; the Continental Resources geologists have studied the cores of every payzones from every sixth well in the Williston Basin
• Continental Resources has amassed almost 1,000,000 acres of the best oil basin in the world, according to Jason Wrangler
• CLR has initiated a program to target the Red River formation, the deepest formation in the Williston Basin;  CLR geologists will see the core samples of every pay zone in the Williston Basin

Now, go back to the first link and start connecting the dots.

The first link above starts out:

Tom Smith helps oil companies find their next big field using a very advanced technology that has been successfully applied in financial, military, and other industries. Smith, along with partner Sven Treitel, are developing and applying what are called unsupervised neural networks. Smith and others are now convinced that analyzing multiple seismic attributes simultaneously reveals information about the potential location of hydrocarbons that may go unnoticed using conventional interpretation methods.

Smith began the investigation into using unsupervised neural networks for seismic interpretation after learning from Turhan Tanner, an award winning geophysicist who passed away in February 2010. Smith and Tanner became co-researchers in this area prior to his death. Treitel, who was Tanner's colleague, then paired with Smith to continue neural network research.

As Smith explains, neurons learn and adapt to the characteristics of the data with which they are presented. Today, seismic interpretation involves six to 100 attributes of seismic data. Every one of those attributes constitutes a 3-D image.

And then this:

"In 1981, when I was teaching and doing consulting work, I was intrigued by the desktop computers at the time. I was teaching three 5-day seminars -- Seismic Data Acquisition, Seismic Data Processing, and Seismic Interpretation. That third class was a computer workshop. With the experience in data processing I gained at Chevron, I found you can learn a lot by running software, and making a fool out of yourself by making mistakes along the way."

Smith then formed Seismic Micro–Technology (SMT) in 1984, where he developed software for his Seismic Interpretation seminar. Smith started on IBM AT (advanced technology) computers and was one of the earliest renters of computers.

"I taught classes in London, Calgary and Houston," Smith explained. "It was always a challenge to march down each row of PCs with floppies and load in the software. We'd hold our breath that our printer would actually print. It was challenging and fun. We were breaking new ground."