The title of this talk is a nod to the work of the late British author, John Le Carre, whose novels of espionage detail some of the tools and tactics, known as tradecraft, employed by the spies in his books as they try to keep their own secrets or extract the secrets of others as the East and the West vie for global superiority in matters military, political, and economic.

We as oil and gas industry geoscientists are also trying to extract secrets, not from Mother Russia, as in Le Carre’s books, but from Mother Earth. This presentation details a few of the tools available to working geoscientists as we try to crack the code of the earth’s history as it is revealed to us, albeit imperfectly, by seismic data.

Some of these tools, which blur the traditional line separating processor and interpreter by allowing the interpreter to condition his own data, are newly accessible to the individual investigator due to their availability on an SaaS, or Software as a Service basis. In this licensing model, users pay for the software only while they are using it, rather than purchasing a permanent license and paying annual maintenance or licensing the software annually, both of which can be prohibitively expensive for a small shop. The emergence of cloud storage and distributed computing puts almost unlimited processing power in the hands of anyone willing to learn new tradecraft.

Other interpretation and processing applications are available at no cost, with add-on, pay-per-use modules that can add powerful techniques such as Artificial Intelligence capabilities to an individual’s toolbox.

There are particularly good and affordable alternatives to excellent and elaborate but expensive forward modeling packages, which can help an interpreter understand the probable seismic response of hydrocarbon saturated sands in difficult-to-evaluate pressured reservoirs and class 2 AVO environments.

Finding oil and gas in old, long explored basins like South Louisiana is difficult. The easy pickings are long gone. Most of what’s left are accumulations that are subtle and/or different from what has already been found, and these will be revealed only with improved seismic data and a better handle on the properties of the rocks we seek to understand.