The big eye-opener of
Mike Ranger’s Geo-Art Data visualization tells the whole story on oil and gas reserves By Scott Rollans
“When I’m working on a new project, I collect all the data and distill it down to mappable parameters. And the first time you map it up, it’s always a big eye-opener, just to see what the picture looks like.” At first glance, you might not peg Mike Ranger (’94, PhD) as an artist. As he sits in his Calgary home office, crunching oilfeld data on his trusty Mac, he definitely doesn’t fit the stereotype. But if art is about making the invisible, visible (as Marcel Duchamp once observed), Ranger certainly qualifies. Ranger spends much of his time processing data from well logs—records stored after a well has been drilled and abandoned—and reviewing core samples in order to produce detailed maps of the Athabasca oil sands subsurface. With the help of Ranger’s maps, producers can get an accurate picture of the bitumen and heavy oil resources—and a lot more, besides. “Not just how thick the oil sands are,” says Ranger, “but, if you have water underlying the oil or on top of the oil, you want to know how thick it is. And, if you’ve got gas associated with the oil, which is not that uncommon, where is that gas? How extensive is it? Is it something that’s going to worry you when you start drilling these wells for bitumen?” Although his clients are just after results, Ranger enjoys the entire process. “It’s one of the things I really love—basic mapping,” he enthuses. “When I’m working on a new project, I collect all the data and distill it down to mappable parameters. And the first time you map it up, it’s always a big eye-opener, just to see what the picture looks like.” To Ranger’s eye, that picture is almost always beautiful. “None of this in the subsurface is 15
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random. It all has a prescribed pattern from nature—whether it’s an ancient shoreface or an ancient river valley. You really don’t know what it’s going to look like until you actually map it out.” Ranger graduated in 1994 after completing a PhD (under supervisor George Pemberton) based on a subsurface basin study of the southern part of the Athabasca oil sands. His timing could hardly have been better, as oil sands recovery was just then rapidly becoming more economically feasible. On top of that, he had computer programming experience extending all the way back to his undergraduate days in the 70s, in the era of punch cards. “That’s where I kind of stand out,” he observes. “I’m able to extract the data, because of my digital computing background.” Instead of signing on with a single employer, Ranger decided to take the freelance route. As a result, he has been able to spread his talents around. “I’ve worked with everybody, from Syncrude, Suncor, Statoil—just about everyone out there,” he says. “The list goes on and on.” As a result, Ranger enjoys a broad perspective on the industry as a whole. “You get a good sense of what’s going on in the whole basin. If you work for just one company, you have extreme familiarity with your own leases, your own land area, but you may not be as familiar with your neighbour with the lease next to you.” In recent years, Ranger has spent much
Mike Ranger studied under George Pemberton, PhD – considered a leader in subsurface basins, critical for understanding the Athabasca oil sands.
“When I’m working on a new project, I collect all the data and distill it down to mappable parameters. And the first time you map it up, it’s always a big eyeopener, just to see what the picture looks like.”