 TRAVELS IN PURGATORY
Memoir Of An Itinerant Petrophysicist
This is a memoir of my life and times, the story of a
long career in science and technology that might never have
occurred.
I was born in the year 80 BC (Before Covid) and
I have been legally blind for more than half my long
life. My travels and career may be an inspiration to others with
poor vision or some other disability. If you start
early, amd put in the effort, amazing things can
happen.
My brother tells me a memoir should be a series of
stories about life, but not in chronological order.
To satisfy him, I have placed the last part at the
beginning, but after that the story is mostly in
order of occurance with minor flashbacks to refresh
my memory and yours - there are just too many
network connections and world events that could not
be explained any other way.
So scroll on down and see how it all happened. If
you remember it differently or just want to say
hello, send me an
email
.
Living in happy valley
In
most democracies, the "ayes" usually have it. In my case, the
"eyes" have
had it, so my consulting and teaching gigs ended June
2016.
Retirement is great -- just as much work but fewer deadlines, less paperwork, no data
quality quagmires
(unless you count fake news).
After
40 years living on my ranch near Rocky Mountain House, I moved to
Valley Ridge on the west edge of Calgary. Here I manage to stay busy
in a very attractive condo, surrounded by green space, trees, and flowers
that I can imagine are always in full bloom.
If
you don't see this sign, you are at the wrong door or building.
The front entrance actually faces Valley Ridge Park NW.
Confused? Talk to Calgary City Planning .==>
Back in the early 1960s,this area was known as Happy Valley. I
much prefer this name to the current one as it recalls the fun
and freedom of 60 years ago. Happy Valley was a privately owned recreation park and campground
12 miles west
of Calgary. It had indoor swimming, go-karts, golf, trampolines,
horse rentals, plus skating rinks and lighted ski hills for winter - great for a day trip
on "days-off" (we worked 24 hours on call for 10 days
followed by 3 days off in those days).
Happy Valley died a slow
death in the 1970s and several attempts to revive it failed.
Then the City limits spilled over and the area was
subdivided, turning into Valley Ridge "Country Estates"
in 1992-93.
<==
Valley Ridge Estates, my unit is at top left.
My condo is a block east of the old swimming pool. The current
golf club house is a short block north and has a fine
restaurant, patio, and garden with fountains and pools. The golf
course circles the eastern half of the community, providing
sanctuary for deer and rabbits. The odd moose and coyote wander
through but are smart enough to return to the river before they
show up on the TV News.
Below is
part of the brochure
for Happy Valley, from those 1960s "Happy Daze".


Happy Vallet in thw 1960x
FIRST FLIGHTS - PROLOGUE TO A LIFE WELL LIVED
Even as a boy, I had no significant peripheral vision, so
I bumped into people and things, broke some bones, couldn't see in dim light.
Until I was 16 years old, no one knew, so I
thought everyone saw what I saw. I didn't know it at the time,
but I was slowly going totally blind.
There is a fancy Latin name for the condition, but call it
tunnel vision for easy reference. The tunnel gets smaller every
year, so today, I can see about 4 characters at a time on this
screen - pretty small tunnel!
Like most young people, I was determined to succeed in
life. At what, no one could tell and the outcome surprised
everyone, especially me.
This history highlights my travels across time and territory. My jobs
have taken me all over the world to many uncomfortable places –
from the Arctic
Islands at 55 below to
the Arabian Desert at 130 above – from the swamps of
Bangladesh and Viet Nam to downtown Beijing, Kuwait City,
Tripoli, Caracas, Jakarta, Bogota, and many of the major cities
of the English speaking world.
Impending blindness is a hell of a motivator – get educated, get a
job, see the world before
it's too late. Every year had the same prognosis,
“You’ll be blind in 5 years, so hurry, hurry!” So I hurried.
The result:
60 years as an
engineer in the oil and gas industry, 49 of them as an
independent petrophysical consultant, and a concurrent career as a rancher for
40 years. The technical work covered 36 countries and I visited
at least 35 countries on assignments or vacations.
More than 3000 students learned the art and science of
petrophysics from my course presentations, and this continues
today with my petrophysics training website. I pioneered
some cutting-edge innovation by implementing
software on desktop computer systems 5 years before the "invention" of the
personal computer. A number of unique software solutions for
petrophysical analysis followed, including research and
development on rule-based expert systems, a form of Artificial
Intelligence.
I am proud of two other achievements: the use of "computer-ready"
math (instead of academic style) in my 1986 textbook, and the
use of the Internet to publish its successor, which has been
continuously expanded and updated since 1999. Training manuals and
software documentation have been on the Internet for some time,
but I was there before the crowd. Computer-ready math has
not yet caught on in the publishing realm, but it must come. Why
continue to use archaic forms when, easier methods are
available?
Living with a disability of any kind, including an "invisible"
disability such as poor vision, is exhausting and isolating. To
compete with the best in your chosen career is always a
challenge. Add to that the difficulty of navigating a dangerous
world or social situations without the benefit of "body
language" clues. Some hazards can be overcome with practice;
sometimes you just give up in pure frustration. Try getting
through an airport to the boarding lounge with your eyes firmly
closed. I am a very independent cuss and relying on others for
assistance was always hard on the ego. I once held a rather
one-sided conversation with an airline hostess in Bangkok
airport. She was a cardboard cutout at the entrance to the first
class lounge. What did the other passengers think?
Lots of people helped me along the way; many are mentioned in
this account. But the dreams were
mine, and I made them happen.
Dream your
own
dreams, then MAKE THEM HAPPEN !
There is much more to tell -- linked to the rest of the story are
at the top of this page
First flights - In The Beginning
It says Ottawa
on my passport, but I have no memory of those early days
of World War II.
Canada's Parliament Building in Ottawa Ontario,
with tulips
in full bloom 
I do remember the move to Montreal in 1944, rationing books for
meat, eggs, and other essentials, my grandfather's big black
car, my brother's birthday in a massive November snowstorm.
Looking back on history, it is clear that we did not "win" this
war. There were 30 million dead soldiers to remember and 41
million civilians killed. This was current events when I started
school, not ancient, forgotten history.
True, the Americans, British, Canadians, Aussies, and a
rag-tag of French resistance fighters liberated Western Europe. But the
Russians won Eastern Europe and milked it dry for more than 40
years, until bad management and television brought about an
anarchistic form of dependent independence to the satellite
Republics. All
the US got was a lend-lease bill for a few trillion dollars, a
lot of distrust because of the Bomb, and
some strategically useful but economically worthless Pacific Island possessions, who would
probably rather not be possessed.
 My parents, sometime before 1940 
The Canadians barely get a
"thank-you", except from the Dutch,
who rewarded us
with tulip bulbs to decorate Ottawa's parkways.
In high school, we
all agonized over the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Cold War, and
other precursors to a possible World War 3. The names have changed,
but the crises continue to evolve and control by fear is now normal
in many, many countries - what would George Orwell write if he was
still alive today?
In the following 17 years, l learned the 3-R’s
plus science and engineering in Montreal.
It was then,
and still is, a beautiful, cosmopolitan city with great
entertainment and 400 years of living culture. Growing up here was
an education in its own right, and spurred an interest in the rest
of the world that has never left me.
I entered
Grade 1 before my 5th birthday, four months after VE Day and
just 3 weeks after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and VJ Day, The radio
news told the story and even children were aware that something
terrible had happened. The Bomb had been born and the world was
forever changed.
Grade school
and high school were easy. My homework was usually done before
class was over. Coming first or second in scholastic
achievement made me a "nerd" long before the word was invented.
Poor eyesight made me poor at sports, bringing some
taunts from classmates.
In Cote Des Neiges, I worked on a horse-drawn milk cart on
the way to grade school to earn streetcar fare for the homeward
journey. This got me past the scary part of the trip.
 There were no
school buses and no lunch rooms, so we all had to make the trip 4
times a day. The streetcar fare was 1-2/3 cents (3 tickets for a
nickel) - inflation over the past 70 years has multiplied this fare
by more than 200 (a 20,000% increase), so if you think your present
salary and savings will carry you into retirement, think again!
We rode brand-new PCC streetcars on Route 29 that ran to within a block of home and the school.
The rest of f the MTC fleet was much older.
Family
outings in the early days were mostly by streetcar: the open-air
"Gold"
cars gave a circle tour of the city,
"White" cars to the end-of-line at Cartierville, "Green" cars to
downtown for Christmas shopping, and Montreal and Southern Counties
interurban cars to "see the country-side". These trips were cheap
and could take all day, with a picnic lunch thrown in.
Gold,
green, and white trolley cars of Montreal, circa 1940-50 (top row)
Montréal and Southern Counties car (bottom).
When gas
rationing faded away, we toured the Montreal Harbour and all the
train yards, giving rise to my permanent interest in transportation,
especially full size
and model trains. Today, you can't get within a mile of
these places without a dozen security checks.
We had two weeks
vacation each year at Grandpa's cottage at Constance Bay just west
of Ottawa. The 200 mile trip took all day on Highway 17 in the
1948 Austin A40. No heat, no power, no running water, and lots of
Poison Ivy were easily
overlooked. The beach was a great adventure,
replete with bagpiper who brought all the kids home at sunset.
Constance Bay, near Ottawa 
Our
family moved west to Notre Dame de Grace in 1950. King George VI
died in 1952 and Queen Elizabeth II became Canada's reigning monarch. One
channel of black-and-white television arrived in Montreal that year,
but our first set didn't arrive until 1954. Montreal West High
School (now privately run Royal West Academy to avoid Quebec's
draconian language law) was a healthy walk 4 times a day until our
move into the new house in Montreal West itself.

Elizabeth
Ballentyne School
Montreal West High School
(Couldn't find a picture of Cote Des Neiges School)
I still remember
some of the teachers: Miss Matthews in Grade
8 (she wanted me to walk home to get dry clothes after arriving wet
- it was still raining), Mr. Cummings (he kept a half-size model of a
Guillotine in the room to intimidate troublemakers), Mr. Mann (a
great and caring PT instructor), and Mr. Wolf (who thought we should
be able to recognize any piece of music by merely listening to him
tap out the rhythm with a pencil). Mr. Parsons, the Principal, was
the stereotypical pompous-ass. If you have ever heard "Our Miss
Brooks" on old-time radio, you know what these people were like.

As a young entrepreneur -- newspaper photo after selling the most chocolate bars for a charity event 
To
further test my courage as a businessman, I sold Regal Christmas
cards, gifts, and wraps door-to-door for 3 years after school
and weekends. Demonstrating samples, taking orders, cash,
cheques, delivering the products to the right house at 11 - 13
years of age. All adults knew every kid for a mile in all
direction so I was safe and accepted into their homes.
In grade
8, all of us were given IQ and aptitude tests. My aptitude was
to be a farmer or a clerk (Big surprise, I loved animals and I
was good at math). I knew better – I was going to
be an engineer. I did become an engineer and recently retired
after 54 years practice engineering
in the oil and gas industry.
But circumstances also made me a farmer and a clerk. I built
a cattle ranch out of the bush at age 40 by choice and was forced
to become a clerk to satisfy the tax collector. At least I
had the aptitude if not the desire for bookkeeping.
My parents were
great travelers. My brother and I had seen all the Canadian provinces
and all the US
states east of the
Mississippi
by the time I was 16. The Trans-Canada
Highway was just a dream and the US Interstate
network was mostly disconnected chunks
of pavement in the middle of farmer’s fields. I loved those
wide open spaces - there was no doubt that I would continue traveling.
During
my high school years,
I worked after
school and summers at Montreal West Hardware
to earn pocket money. Here, I learned how to repair
almost anything - there were no throw-away gadgets in that era - and
how to sell Christmas trees, lawn mowers, and small appliances. Ray Nettleship, two full-time clerks
(Red and Ernie), and a handyman were
generous to a fault. Stock in the basement included horse harness
and ferrier equipment; the main floor was nails, screws, post-war
appliances, and unbreakable dishes; upstairs was living quarters for
the owner and his family.
After
high school graduation, I took a week's vacation to visit family
friends in Florida. Eastern Airlines ran Douglas DC-7B's at about 7000 feet,
following the highways to aid navigation. I'm not sure what they did
on rainy days - there was no weather radar.

My first air travel was on an Eastern Airlines DC-7B to Florida 
For some reason, the
crew though I was an Eastern employee and treated me extremely well,
until my true age slipped out (a mere 16 years). After that, I was
just another passenger. This was my first aircraft trip; since then,
I've covered well over a million miles in dozens of countries on
every type of aircraft imaginable.
Eastern was run by Eddie Rickenbacker, a famous World War 1 flying
ace, who lost his CEO position in 1959, when he resisted the
purchase of jet aircraft to replace the propeller driven ships. He
thought jets were just a fad. Even with astronaut Frank Borman as CEO,
Eastern faltered in the 1970's, was taken over and raided by Frank
Lorenzo's Texas Air, and finally died in 1991. Failure to adapt
to changing technology dooms businesses, politicians, and ordinary
human endeavours - a lesson best learned early in life.
Getting my driver's license posed no problem although the
examiner placed a restriction requiring me to have side-view
mirrors due to my tunnel vision. Side-view mirrors were only
available in the after-market -- no manufacturer offered them as
a standard or optional accessory. When I moved to Alberta 4
years later, they had no such restriction, so they insisted I
wear my glasses at all times, as if that would fix the tunnel
somehow. I did install the mirrors on all my vehicles, including
company cars, until they became standard on new vehicles.

With many family connections, I
took a promotion from hardware to a summer job with the Bell
Telephone Company while attending McGill University. The company had been around since
1880 and was a pretty solid bet. There was well over 100 years of
Bell service in the family and I was expected to follow these
hallowed footsteps. The first summer was pole inspection - a
real dream job in the country and elegant neighbourhoods, a little
hot in the tight quarters of the older city center. Our foreman
turned down an invitation on our behalf to Honey-Boo's pool, even
when it looked like a great idea to the rest of us at noon on a 95
degree summer day.
The
next 3 summers were spent in the Outside Plant Engineering department at
Bell Telephone. The
Bell System Practices (BSP's) were our bible and code book for
everything. The only job I did that wasn't in the book was to move a
concrete underground man-hole 6 feet to the west to get if off
private property. Since every long distance wire between Montreal,
Ottawa, and Toronto went through this man-hole, it was a tricky
maneuver. My final
project was to design a cable TV system to be routed on existing
telephone poles. It would be a contract job for Bell, but by the end
of summer, it became clear that all my work was for nothing. The
client could not raise the capital for the job, and it was done by
others over the next couple of years - a disappointing end to my
telephone career.
Unfortunately, I have forgotten the names of the engineers and
technicians who taught me so much, save for one. Andy Berczy
stayed alive in my memory for his escape from Hungary to Canada
in 1956 as the Russians poured in to quell a populist rebellion.
Andy mastered English and Canadian culture in a year and was my
mentor for my first summer in Bell's Outside Plant Engineering
Department. Thanks Andy.
 
Streetcars, later the new busses, and red maples meant back to
school 
Back to
University signaled the end of the summer job as Trainee Engineer at
the Bell, where
the job, the people, and the freedom were far more interesting. So
it was a bit of a melancholy moment to change from employee back to
student, until the pressure of homework squeezed out all such
thoughts.
Thanks to the
financial and moral support of my parents, I graduated
as an Electrical Engineer in 1962 from McGill
University. I was merely
16 years old on entering and barely 21 when I graduated from the
5-year degree. I am quite ambivalent about my education at
McGill. Transistors were invented in 1955, IBM and UNIVAC computers
existed, and Sputnik was launched in 1957, but we learned nothing
related to
these.
Wrong choice of electives, maybe. In 1959, I built transistorized
stereo hi-fi amplifier and radio tuner kits from Harmon-Kardon and a
couple of instruments from Heath Kit - my sole
exposure to the post vacuum tube era.
The Macdonald Engineering Building
was 49 years old in 1957 when I started University and is still in use today, with little
change except for better lighting. The lab gear was turn-of-the-century (19th century, that is).
It all seemed so primitive. I remember a Wheatstone bridge that
Professor Wheatstone himself must have built in his garret.

The MacDonald Engineering Building circa 1958 
The new McConnell Engineering
Building opened in 1959, doubling the number of classrooms and labs.
Strangely, I don't have any memories of this building except for the
main two-story theater-style lecture hall. I remember very little of the
instructors. They were a cheerless lot with little interaction with
individual students. My fault or theirs, I'll never know.
Sixty years have passed; new buildings, modern facilities, and the trend
toward a less formal teaching style have changed all that.
The school has always ranked extremely well in surveys over the
years. Even US customs and immigration people have heard of the
place.
I did learn advanced-math, physics, chemistry, mechanics, and
thermodynamics, and these served me well in my later career in the
oil industry. I could design an AC motor and a transformer back then
-- not any more.
 The well dressed student in 1961
at the Engineer's Ball. I designed the Tic-Tac-Toe machine using a
telephone switch board device called a cross-bar switch to create
the logic that allowed the machine to always win. I didn't
appreciate it at the time but I had built my first computer, and
possibly the first "video game".
Swimming at lunch hour was my escape while others went to the pubs
on Peel and McTavish Streets - still too young to be legal, although that didn't
always stop me from joining in.

Graduation photo, Spring 1962 
Job
offers were plentiful – pulp mills, transformer design, power line
design, telephone and cable television – the world was being wired
in 1962. So I chose well logging.
It
had wires and electronics too, and a chance to travel.
“What
is well logging?” my mother asked.
“I have no idea.” I replied. “Where is it done?”
she asked. I told her. She cried. Western Canada was uncivilized
territory, at least in her opinion.
The FLQ had begun bombing mailboxes in Montreal
in 1962, in support of Quebec
separation. It was hard to say which place was less civilized.
!!
Keep scrolling down - there's 60+ years to go!
Learning The Trade - Schlumberger
I bought my father’s Austin
A55 Mk II, filled it with prized possessions, and ended up in Red
Deer, Alberta.
For the next 11 years, I learned the oil business on the job in
western Canada,
from Schlumberger, Geophysical Services, Dome Petroleum, J. C.
Sproule, and Digitech.
Lets start with Schlumberger, well logs, and travelling. This
four year stint shaped the foundations of my entire career. No
matter how hard I tried to get away from them, I was always drawn
back to well logs.
My memory of the first field job is still vivid. It was a warm
evening beside a wheat field near Eckville, Alberta, a few days
before the summer solstice. The northwest sky was still
bright at 11:00 PM, beautiful shades of blues and purples. We
rigged up the equipment in the derrick, ran the job, and started
rigging down. A glance to the northeast and the sky was bright
again with the tip of the sun just appearing -- it was 3:00 in
the morning. Amazing! I was hooked and Alberta summers have been
a joy ever since. Winters are a different story, but we will
ignore that for now.
So, what is a well log? It is a record of the
physical properties of rocks recorded versus depth in a well bore,
using various electrical and radioactivity measuring devices. It is
recorded on paper or film (and now as a digital data file) so that
we can view the data values, analyze them using calculators or
computer software, and generate numerical answers that help us
understand the possible presence of oil or gas or minerals that
might be economically extracted for use by all of us.
Each wiggly line on this image is a well log "curve" and the
entire image is a portion of a complete "well log". Depths in the well bore run in the
vertical direction on the image. Each log curve represents one particular physical property of the rocks.
Modern society could not survive without well logs -
in a round-about way, they keep us warm, power our homes, and drive
our trains, planes, and automobiles. Virtually every object we own
contains some part made directly from oil -- lipstick, nylons,
clothes, furniture, paint, plastic, not to mention the energy that it took to
extract the materials needed to manufacture the item, and deliver it
around the world to you.
I lived in 13 different small towns and ran well
logs for Schlumberger from southwest Manitoba to Peel Plateau in the Yukon. I learned to work “on-call”,
learned to drink on “days-off”, and drive 80,000 miles
a year just to get to work.
Passenger planes still had propellers and a
mobile phone set weighed in at 50 pounds.
During one of the
3-day "days-off", I drove from Red Deer to Seattle over the Rogers
Pass and return in the Austin to see the 1962 World's Fair. This was
the year the Trans-Canada Highway was finally finished with real
pavement. A piston blew at the top of the Rockies on the way home,
leaving no choice but to continue homeward engulfed in a cloud of
blue smoke maintained by five gallons of 80 weight gear lube
"borrowed" from a construction site. Other 1962 milestones
were Canada's first satellite (Alouette 1, using those new-fangled
transistors), the first James Bond movie (Doctor No, starring Sean
Connery), and the arrival of the Beatles in North America.
Each
location manager treated me well; most would all have connections to my career later
on. Log analysis was charts and monographs, or pencil and slide rule. There were no
calculators, no spreadsheets, no personal computers. While
still stationed in Red Deer, I did vacation relief in Stettler
and Drayton Valley. Both were one-truck stations with good crews
and good TAS (telephone answering service -- no voice-mail yet).
Training
was intensive, constant, and judged by exams. The Houston training session
was serious stuff. The day I arrived it snowed and froze –
the Canadians were not forgiven. I drove there and back as part
of my vacation time, seeing a bunch of the Western states for
the first, but not the last, time. On the way home, I followed
snowplows from Farmington to Durango,
where I spent a week watching the weather channel (it had great
background music) studying for my field engineer exam. Barry McVicar
was my examiner and he still tells tall tales about the event.

My 1964 Plymouth Fury
I was assigned a
series of company cars with crapped-out steering and soggy suspensions,
finally receiving a new Plymouth Fury in 1964. A company car was home -
bedroom, kitchen, living room, and office while at the well sites. I
drove over 80,000 miles in 1964, just to get to work.
Dave Dudley's
"Six Days On The Road" was our theme song. Many nights on
the road were spent listening to distant radio stations: country
music on WSM Nashville, Studs Turkle telling stories on WGN Chicago,
and a good variety of music on KFBK Sacramento. KFBK is now
right-wing shock-jock-talk - what a waste of bandwidth. Local
stations in that era went off the air at 11 or midnight and didn't
reappear until 6 or 7 AM. I have been a fan of old-time radio (OTR)
shows ever since and have a large collection -- helps to keep the
old memory banks alive.
During
1963, I was a YESS man: Young, Eager, Single, and Stupid,
so I did the relief engineer slot – 3 days on each truck
in Oxbow, Weyburn, and Swift Current - 12 days on duty, on call 24
hours a day, then 3 days off. After 6 months of this, I ran the
station in Lanigan, Saskatchewan
for about 4 months.
Then I had a truck of my own in Oxbow.
The Cuban
missile crisis, the beginnings of Viet Nam, and the Kennedy
assassination took place during all this turmoil.
Everyone old
enough to remember knows exactly where they were when President
Kennedy was shot in November 1963. I was on the side of a lease
road, in a company car, filling out a service order near Hazlet,
Saskatchewan. Patsy Cline and Hawkshaw Hawkins died earlier the
same year in a plane crash. Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe
had both committed suicide the previous year. Icons were
disappearing quickly and it was a lonely period for a single man
bouncing around in small towns.
A recent email reminds me to mention that we ran well logs for
things other than oil and gas, namely potable water, potash, and
helium. Some years later, I would also log wells for sulphur and
copper. The helium well was logged in southwest Saskatchewan in
1964 and finally put on production in 2016! The potash industry
got me transferred to Lanigan, SK.

This chart and related equations were the
end result of my first research project 
There
was nothing, I mean
Nothing!, to do in Lanigan, so I did
original research, in my spare time, on log analysis in the Saskatchewan
potash beds.
I was invited to visit the
underground mine at Esterhazy to see
how the real rocks compared to real logs. Seeing geology from the
"inside" sharpened my appreciation for the variability of nature.

IBM 1620 computer in Regina, 1964
My first computer
program was written in 1964 to
calculate potash analysis from well log data. It ran on the IBM
1620
with 60K memory in Regina.
This machine read the program and data from
punched cards and printed results on a chain printer. There were no
disk drives on this machine, although such things did exist - they
were 2 feet in diameter and held 1 Megabyte, with access times that
could reach 1 second per retrieval.
The results
of this research were presented at the CIMM convention in
Edmonton. Al Gorrell,
of J. C. Sproule and Associates, listened to my practice
presentation and taught me how to project to a small audience
in a large room. The conference was held at the Macdonald Hotel,
amidst gobs of gilt and masses of mahogany, the tell-tale signs of
the grand-chateau style hotels built by the Canadian railways (now owned by Fairmont Hotels, in
turn owned by an Arab investment group).
My independent
research surprised Schlumberger and they awarded me a “Salesman
of the Year” scroll, even though I wasn’t a salesman.
The results from this research ended up in four other technical
papers and a several Schlumberger Interpretation Manuals.
Lesser Slave Lake at sunset, my home for the last 2
years of my Schlumberger
career.
I was “a little too interested” in logging
potash wells, so I was transferred to Valleyview
in late 1964,
then to Slave
Lake. The town of Slave Lake suffered from a severe wildfire in 2011
and many businesses and homes were lost, including the fourplex
I had lived in many years before (1965 and 1966).
From
here, we covered a huge territory with few paved roads,
stretching from Fort McMurray and Calling Lake to the East, Swan
Hills and House Mountain to the South, Rainbow Lake and Zama to
the North, and Fort St. John and Monkman Pass to the West.
We flew in Beavers and single Otters,
cruised the treetops in Bell 204s and G-4s, slogged
through swamps and snow drifts on Nodwells
and Bombardier Sno-Cats, forded rivers
and played daisy-chain at the end of D-8 Cats in the company car.
Sometimes we even got to drive on pavement.
On one job near Calling Lake, we drove into a Hudson's Bay
Company
Trading Post. A little blond girl ran from us, screaming
"Mommy, Mommy, White Men!" We were Strangers in a Strange Land.
My first job in
northern Alberta was out of Swan Hills. I had driven from Oxbow in
southeast Saskatchewan (about 700 miles) to find a hand-drawn map to the
wellsite taped to the shop door. I was used to the square grid of
township roads in the south and the map looked pretty square. But
there are no grid-line roads in Swan Hills - I spent about three
hours going in circles, finding my self back at the same confusing
intersection in the middle of the wilderness. The route least
traveled turned out to be the trail to the rig.

The church at Teepee Creek Alberta, 1965
The
marriage license said Slave
Lake
married Red Deer in Teepee Creek – how much
more Western Canadian could you get? Mother cried again. We honeymooned
in Hawaii – it was a long way from Wabasca, Fort
Nelson, and Fort McKay, the Purgatories of the day
- and a whole lot warmer.
The plane was a CP Air Super Constellation, with 4 noisy engines
and 4 propellers.
 
Waikiki Beach, Diamond Head, Royal Hawaiian Hotel 
We drank Mai-Tai's on the catamaran cruise, circled Oahu
in a passionate-pink Jeep, and dined at the Royal Hawaiian.
It was pink, too.
I had been listening to "Hawaii Calls" on the
radio every Sunday night for years in Montreal - Hawaii was like coming home!
Back at
Slave Lake, my wife
insisted on seeing a wireline logging job
at a drilling rig, so we went out to a Big Indian rig, drilling
"post-holes" near Calling
Lake. The
rig camp was atrocious and the cook had an oozing knife slash across
his left eye. We declined breakfast and my wife slept in the car.
She didn’t ask to go out again.
There
were some exciting trips. On the way to Peel Plateau in the Yukon, we boarded the Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-3
passenger flight to Dawson
City from Edmonton.
The plane was painted Bright Orange,
the stewardess (no one had heard of flight attendants in that
era) was dressed in a gorgeous blue uniform, nylons, and high
heels. Knowing we would soon be in mud-heaven, we were in our
best grubbies. Our logging tools were
tied to the floor in the aisle. Coffee,
sandwiches, and cookies were served
while carefully perched on the sonic log sonde. The stew later
admitted she had been assigned to this flight because she had
done something “bad”, but declined to specify
exactly what this might have been.
Electronics in the logging
unit in the pre-digital era circa 1964 
Next day
we transshipped everything to a Beaver and set off to find our
skid unit at the rig. A Beaver can’t climb much with a full
load, so my photos (now lost to posterity)
show mountainsides only a few hundred yards
from the cockpit window. It was summer but it snowed throughout
the job. There were not enough bunks so I slept on a spare bed
with no mattress in the meat locker – cold but quiet and
no cigarette smoke.
On the way out,
we had a two day layover in
Dawson
City,
waiting for the orange bird – the geologist played the washboard
and one-string laundry tub in the bar that night, although it never got dark, of course.
During the day, we explored Robert Service's cabin, open and
untended, but full of furniture and books. The hospital, abandoned
since the Klondike Gold Rush, was collecting museum artifacts -
railway locomotives, mining machinery, old cars.

The heart of a well logging job is the logging truck, which
houses all the electronic equipment, the down hole tools, and
the winch and cable connecting the tools to the surface
recorder.
On a spring
breakup job in Red Earth, we got stuck in the mud on the way out
after the job and ran out of fuel and food and water. We were
out of radio contact too. Someone claimed they sent a chopper
to find us after we went missing, but we never saw it. On the
second night the rig’s fuel truck showed up inbound
on the frost and
filled us up. We drove out, two days late and suffering
dehydration from drinking swamp water. We got a lecture from the
boss, who was wearing a sport jacket and pressed slacks at the time. We
were less attractive.

On remote fly-in jobs where there were no roads, a skid unit was used instead of a truck
Many trips
were fly-ins, especially during spring and summer. This meant
driving to an airport, or more likely a staging area beside a bush
airstrip. Loading tools into an Otter or slinging them in nets under
a Bell 204-B was hazardous. The usual problems of weather, icing,
navigation, mud, and weariness made it all a little surreal.
What made
the stress worse was the need to strip all the equipment and
connecting cables from your logging truck, keep them dry, and
reconnect everything inside the skid unit at the rig. One missing
cable or tool and the job could be delayed for hours, even days. On
return, you had to strip it all out and reconnect back in the
logging truck before you could have a bath or go to the bar. You don't
have to go to war to experience battle fatigue.
Somewhere along
the way, I purchased a 1948 MG-TD, rewired it with armoured logging
cable, and used it as my personal car. No heater and no side screens
made it useless for about 8 months of the year, but it was fun.
Wives don’t
thrive in isolated oil field towns. There was a strong push to
get a “real” job, in the city, in the office. And
lo, it was so.
Schlumberger
is still the recognized leader in well logging, but competition
is more capable than in my logging days.
My connections to Schlumberger persisted through my entire
career. I supervised their crews in the Canadian Arctic and
Alberta as a client rep for 10 years, consulted to them or their
subsidiaries on several occasions, and recommended their
services to many of my consulting clients.
Ironically, 40 years
after leaving SLB, I was invited to teach Schlumberger stimulation
and coiled tubing engineers all
about logging and log analysis several times a year at Tulsa University.
This went on for 5 years. The students were
so young, so keen, so naive - just like I was once upon a
time.
Special thanks go to Tom Wilson who interviewed then hired me
from McGill, Barry McVicar who made sure I had learned enough to
become a General Field Engineer, and to all the Location
Managers like Al Chase, Al Dorin, Bill Anderson, Bob Wilson, Mel
Gray, and others, as well as all the Operators who made me look
good. Barry McVicar also gave me a most entertaining "Roast" in
1994 at my induction as an Honourary Member of the CWLS. He
remembered, or invented, 20 minutes of hilarious anecdotes about
me, all of which I categorically deny. The audience loved it.
Learning The Trade – Geophysical Services
Geophysical Services Inc had been acquired by Texas Instruments and was bragging about
their new TIAC model 870
"automatic computer" for processing seismic
data recorded on digital magnetic tape. Up to
this point, all seismic data was acquired and processed on huge
multi-track analog tapes.
Sounded intriguing. Applied,
hired, moved to Calgary in a week in
June 1966. My wife smiled all the way there.

An anonymous TIAC 870 computer
The TIAC
had only 8 Kb ferrite core memory (really slow) and read field data
from 1 inch, 21 track tapes. It filled a large room, weighed a
couple of tons, and needed massive amounts of air conditioning to
stay alive. The program was read from punched paper
tape, as were the analysis parameters prepared by us, the "geophysical
engineers". Due to the small memory, some intermediate
calculations were written to and read from a tape drive - disc
drives arrived a few years later. A FORTRAN compiler allowed us to
write our own routines when needed. It should be noted that when
disc drives did arrive in the late 1960's, they were huge and heavy
- one TI version was mounted on a horizontal shaft that needed
Boeing 737 landing gear bearings to support it.
 
The wiggly curves on the left-hand image are the original recorded
data from a single seismic dynamite shot. Time is in the vertical
direction instead of depth as on a well log. The cross section at
the right is the final product derived from many records, after
processing to remove noise and geometrical effects. Bright areas in
both images are "reflections" of sound waves from different layers
of rock beneath the surface. By mapping these reflections, we can
locate possible places where oil and gas may be found.
GSI patents
gave them the lion's share of the digital acquisition and processing
business for a few years. The IBM/360, 9 track field tapes, and
competition broke this near-monopoly and by 1970 most people were
using the newer formats and processing centers. Digital recording and
processing of geophysical data was a genuine revolution in both
technique and in the quality of results. It was a great learning
experience to be so close to the cutting edge.

Calgary skyline, 1968
I bought a used
Austin A55 station wagon to survive the first winter and traded it
for a nearly new MGB-GT hatchback in gleaming white - a very rare
car. The MG-TD continued as the summer car. I put a down-payment on a
house in Brentwood in Calgary, on the western edge of the city. Yuppie-dom was looming.
A few crash
courses in geophysics and I was a geophysical engineer, working
for Carl Hickman, setting up data processing runs. I remember
learning to convert decimal numbers to hexadecimal and back
again, but I can't remember why, since the input parameters were
coded in decimal. The TIAC worked in hex, so there must have
been a conversion program in the system somewhere.
My logging
experience made me an instant “expert” so logging,
then geology courses were suddenly
part of the job. I certainly learned more preparing the
courses than my co-workers did from my presentations.
Imagine an electrical engineer with a one-semester course in
hard-rock geology teaching soft-rock oilfield geology - not a pretty
sight.
In 1967,
I wrote a seismic inversion program for the TIAC to generate a
synthetic sonic log from deconvolved seismic traces. It didn’t
work, of course, or I would be world famous. I didn’t understand
the need for low frequency data – data that wasn’t
in the seismic signal. Roy Lindseth
solved the problem a couple of years later and he IS world famous.
We'll meet Roy again in the fifth reel.
On vacation,
we drove to Montreal in the MGB to visit Expo 67, the
celebration of Canada's 100th Birthday. Similar to the World's
Fair, it highlighted achievements of many countries, not just
Canada's, which were somewhat overshadowed by the US and Russian
pavilions. It was the middle of the Cold War. My fondest memory
is the Mariachi music carried on the gentle harbour breeze from
the Mexican pavilion.

Panorama of the Rocky Mountains west of Calgary -- a view I
cherish to this day.
The Calgary
Tower was built during 1967-68 to a height of 190 meters (630 feet)
providing a rotating restaurant and a spectacular view of the Rocky
Mountains. No longer the tallest building, it still acts as
the focal point of downtown Calgary.

TI headquarters in Dallas, 1968
Meetings
in Dallas and assignments in Midland taught me what
hot weather was really like - kind of a Purgatory I was told. I’ll
take Alberta
winter any day. On a side trip from an SEG convention in
Houston, we took a long weekend in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The
Appleton Express, then a Budd RDC1 rail diesel car, took us to the
interior of the island and a tour of the Appleton Rum
Distillery. The 80 mile return trip took all day and certainly got
into the hills to see local sights. Out of service for many years,
there is talk of revitalizing the railway as a tourist train.
I did a
little PR-style marketing in Edmonton, Regina, and Quebec City,
plus market research, data acquisition logistics for
Dan Brennan, GSI's Regional Manager.
On one such trip to Quebec, I was bumped to First Class and sat with a
Toronto lawyer, sipping free brandy for several hours. This was
when Air Canada's First Class was actually first-class.
Conversation turned to pastimes and wives. He said his wife was
a pianist. I said "My wife plays the piano, too." He
replied "I
said she was a pianist, she does not "play piano".. The conversation ended there;
fortunately the brandy flowed on.
During a trip to Regina, Air Canada pilots went on strike, so I
arranged to take the rental car to Saskatoon and catch the Via Rail
"Canadian" to Edmonton and a PWA commuter flight to Calgary. My
seat-mate this time was a very nice lady headed to Vancouver to
visit her mother. We had the dome car to ourselves and conversation
was very pleasant. We watching the snow-covered prairie scenery
slide by in the moonlight - very romantic. Ah, Diane, where are you
now?
The original GSI left
Canada
many years ago. Texas Instruments sold the
company to Halliburton in 1988, who tried to merge it with GeoSource
(ex-Petty-Ray Geophysical) but this failed due to personality
conflicts. Halliburton sold its
seismic assets in 1994 to Western Atlas. Baker Hughes bought Western
Atlas in 1998. Western Atlas was merged into Western Geco in 2000, a
70-30 joint venture between Schlumberger and Baker Hughes. Not a
single GSI employee survived this corporate struggle. Although I was
not involved in any of this, it is an instructive insight into the
precarious nature of employment in the oil and gas industry.
One individual,
Davey Einarson,
survived the mergers until 1994 when he purchased the rights to the GSI name and the non-exclusive seismic database. He might have
acquired the first non-exclusive data set that I set up for GSI in
1967. So the GSI name
lives on today, in Calgary and Houston, but it's an entirely
different business.
Learning The Trade – Dome Petroleum
A headhunter found me buried in his files and convinced
me to move to Dome Petroleum as a reservoir engineer in early
1968. With well logging, seismic processing, and a tiny bit of
geology training, I was far from a reservoir engineer. I knew
it but Dome didn’t. So I read Craft and Hawkins, wrote down
a dozen equations so I could talk sense about material balance
and pressure buildup, and learned the rest on the job.

The IBM 1130 was the size of a large desk 
I was slightly
computer literate because of the GSI training, so soon I was adapting
IBM 1130 Fprtran IV programs for Dome’s use.
The
1130 read punched cards but had removable, multi-layer
disks, about the size of a huge birthday cake. It booted by
setting toggle switches on the console, and could take 8 hours
to compute a single petrophysical analysis -- a task that takes
microseconds today.
Guess who taught log analysis
to the engineers and geologists?
Martin Luther
King and Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy were both
assassinated in 1968 - more icons gone.
Inside of a year, this job was leading
nowhere. Even though I had adapted the IBM
1130 reservoir engineering programs for Dome's use, no-one
actually wanted to use them, preferring instead pencil, paper,
and slide rule. Darwin was wrong. Evolution is not survival
of the fittest; it is survival of the most adaptable.
I resigned
and my wife and I drove the MGB-GT to
Toronto in a little under 48 hours to see
the 1968 Grey Cup game. Calgary
Stampeders lost
21-24 to Ottawa Rough Riders, but it was a great game. No job, no prospects, no problem.
Father was concerned – he had worked all his
life for Bell Telephone –
here I was looking for my fourth job in 7
years.
This was long before Dome grew to be the biggest
bankruptcy in Canadian history, after blowing eight billion of
Other People’s Money on worthless assets and Arctic gas
that no one could deliver to market. Dome Petroleum
is long gone and most of its assets wound up at Amoco Canada in 1988.
Amoco merged with British Petroleum (BP) late in 1998 and the
Amoco name on gas stations was merged into oblivion in 2002.
"Smilin' Jack"
Gallagher and Charlie Dunkley ran a tight ship in the early days
of Dome - too bad they didn't keep a tighter rein on the debt later on.
Dome became a major client of mine in the mid 1970s, when Jim
Hamilton, one of my mentors at Dome (and ex-Schlumberger engineer
like me), acquired three of our LOG/MATE desktop log analysis
systems, and offloaded a significant amount of consulting work to us
as well. Sadly, cancer took Jimmy from us long before a sane world
would have allowed.
Learning The Trade – Sproule
and Associates
I had finished an industry course on Petroleum
Economics given by Tony Edgington of J. C. Sproule and
Associates Ltd, so I phoned him to see if he knew anyone looking
for someone with logging, geophysics, and reservoir engineering
skills. He did. He was. The company was only 8 years old but was well known for its
reserves estimates and for its pioneering work in geological
exploration of Canada's Arctic regions. It was Dr. Sproule's work on
the geology of northern Canada and his personal drive that led to
the formation of PanArctic Oils Ltd. More on that later. Dr. Sproule
received little credit or financial gain for his effort to convince
government and industry to develop the North.
The integration of geology
and engineering was very appealing, so I accepted the offer without
a second thought.
Cam Sproule
introduced himself on day one. Tony Edgington, Noel Cleland,
Mike Brusset, and Blake Marshall
became my mentors, taught me how to “leave footprints in
the snow” so anyone could pick up my projects and update
them without re-doing them. This was the most valuable lesson
I ever learned on the job.
Al Gorrell, the
senior geologist at Sproule, was instrumental
in guiding my early attempts to find truth in log data. He was
successful in instilling a sense of excitement and wonder about
all things scientific, especially the infant science of quantitative
log analysis, soon to become known as the science of
petrophysics. He gave unstintingly of his time, experience, and
knowledge to all who asked. He traveled the world over on oil,
gas, water, and mineral exploration projects, as well as social
and humanitarian endeavours. Al Gorrel was killed in a terrorist attack
on a hotel in Manilla, Phillipines, on 12 February 1985 while
on a mission for the United Nations. Al's
legacy lives on in all who knew him. Unfortunately, terrorism
seems to live on as well.
Four ladies
actually ran Sproule; the tea-lady,
the librarian, the geological secretary, and the engineering secretary
ran everything, and very well indeed, thank you. Although this
is a bit of an exaggeration, it never paid to forget their power.
Today, of course, there are no tea-ladies or secretaries,
just coffee machines and executive assistants, and damn few of
the latter.
The reservoir
engineering tasks were interesting and the cash flow was purposely
conservative. The banks loved it and it suited the Canadian psyche
of the era.
Early on,
I wrote a log analysis program that ran on the CDC 3300. Computrex could digitize short chunks of logs and put
them out on punch cards. There was only one
building in Calgary with a floor strong enough to carry the
weight of the rotating drum memory. It was an old grain mill.
We used the program only rarely –
many jobs were done with pencil and paper and a
slide rule,
just like we did it at Dome Petroleum.
Then, in
the spring of 1969, came King Resources. They wanted to explore
for sulphur on Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic.
This would involve seismic, gravity, magnetics,
strat hole drilling, surface geology, ocean and ice surveys
– you name it, it was on the list. Sproule
were the Arctic experts and landed the contract to run the
program.
I was assigned to create a logging system
for slim hole sulphur exploration. Out came the catalogs and shortly
a helicopter-portable mini-logging unit was a reality. Someone
had to run it. Me.
My wife
objected. We were trying to build a new house in Bragg Creek.
I went anyway.
This was the
summer that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon with Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin. We heard about it from Voice of Russia, which came
in well on my portable radio. Most of the crew at Caribou Lake on Melville Island
felt that we had landed there too. Pretty barren, pretty cold,
and our life-line was long and tenuous.
Nothing happened on the house – no contractor would listen to
a wife when the husband was off in terra incognito. At Caribou
Lake
nothing was happening either. Someone had forgotten to assign
a project manager. I radioed back, explained that every team was
waiting on orders. Sproule assigned a project manager. Me,
with help by radio-phone from Stan Harding who had years of experience in the
Arctic.
So I surveyed
the well locations, got the drills to work; laid out some seismic
lines on a map, got the seismic underway. Others saw action, so
on their own, they started to work. I did the initial well location
surveys with sun shots and an almanac, just like David Thompson
170 years earlier. Later we used a Tellurometer
that didn’t like cold weather and computed the data with
a Monroe comptometer,
assisted by 7-figure trigonometry tables.
People would sneak in to make the machine divide 1.0 by 3.0 and
watch it run forever, but it never died on us. Surveying was hampered
by the fact that one of the Canadian government benchmarks wasn’t
located where it was supposed to be.

Dome Petroleum's Drake Point blow out in 1969 about 2 miles from
our base camp. This picture is the relief well the following year.
Early
in my first tour of duty at Caribou Lake in 1969, the well being
drilled by Dome Petroleum a couple of miles away blew out. We watched
proceedings from a safe distance, but went on with our work. The
blowout built an ice cone 200 feet high and was visible for many
years on satellite photos. In 1973, I was back at Drake Point,
supervising logging crews for PanArctic Oils -- small world!

Resolute Bay Airport
PWA Hercules
I logged the sulphur exploration wells too, but spent most of my time on logistics:
food, fuel, accommodation, camp staff, drilling supplies, land
and air transport, radio communications, marital counseling, daily
reports, planning, and more planning.
I had to
fire the helicopter pilot because he scared the rig hands (that
takes a bit of doing) and he refused to stop buzzing rigs and
camps. The nearest replacement pilot was in Montreal.
We got him, but it took nearly ten days for
him to arrive. In the meantime, crews slept at the rigs while the sky-jock was
“sick”. He probably was sick, burnt-out and unbalanced
from too many hours on traffic patrol for a Toronto
TV station.
This was
my first management post and I still don’t like telling
a person that his services are no longer required, regardless
of how dire the circumstances.
King Resources
was a high-flyer. They brought a plane load of Directors and investors
to camp and expected meals and beds. John Glenn,
the first US astronaut to circle the globe in a spacecraft (Feb
1962), was
among them, as was
John King himself. The
nearest spare beds were at Resolute
Bay. They
weren’t available so we hot-sheeted for three days until
the illuminati got tired of the primitive facilities.
Native
sulphur lay on the surface in several locations, the result of
erosion and chemical alteration of gypsum from Barrow Dome. NASA
insists that this dome is a "salt dome" and uses it in training
materials. When I tried to explain that gypsum is not "salt" in
the sense of "halite or rock salt", they replied that gypsum was
also a salt, so they were "Right". "Stuff" and nonsense - don't
use gypsum on your next steak. It takes years to dissolve
(that's why we make wall board from it) and it tastes terrible.
All the
King Resources brass
went home with a bag of loose sulphur, probably all the native
sulphur to be had on Melville Island. We didn’t find any more
than a trace in the drill holes.
We did
find oil at the south edge of Barrow Dome, the gypsum dome that
was the source of the surface sulphur, but no one was
interested at the time. It could have been a wreck as the rig
hands were getting sick from fumes emanating from the well. There
was oil in the samples and probably natural gas or CO2 flowing
freely. There could have been a fire and there was no blow out preventer (BOP). In time, the gas
dissipated but I had the crew
shut down the rig anyway.
This was 1969 and only a few wells had been drilled in the High
Arctic, and except for Dome Petroleum's gas blowout at Drake
Point near our base camp at Caribou Lake, none showed much in
the way of hydrocarbons. I ran a drill stem test by tying a
burlap sack to the end of the drill pipe and then squeezing the
oil into a few sample vials.
I kept one sample as a souvenir and in 1973, donated it to Bob
Meneley of PanArctic Oils Ltd, who had hired me to supervise all
their well logging and petrophysical analysis for the company.
Bob quotes this oil discovery in some of his technical papers as
evidence for more oil plays to be found near this and other
piercement domes in the Arctic. He forgot to credit me with the
gift of this oil sample, my one and only claim to be a real Oil
Baron. History will never record it, but I found the first oil
in the Canadian High Arctic!
Another disaster in the making
involved wildlife. King Resources had agreed to let
Al Oeming, owner of a game farm/zoo
in Edmonton, to use our
camp while catching, with permits, three caribou. We had no spare
beds for the 4 men and little spare food, with our bi-monthly
supply flight still a long time off. After 10 days without catching
a caribou, I assigned the chopper and two rig hands with nets
to assist. In no time they bulldogged the critters, wrapped them
in nets ready to travel. Even tanked, they were not happy campers.
It was
time for my rotation back to Calgary
so I got the chance to ride with two of the trussed up caribou
in the twin engine Dornier to Resolute Bay.
Our French speaking pilot said a few unkind words that sounded
like “merde” as various body fluids seeped into the cable
channel that went to the tail rudder. It wasn’t hard to
remember that everything freezes at 10,000 feet. The caribou and
I caught the Pacific Western scheduled flight to Edmonton. I arrived safely, but I can’t
speak for the caribou.
On my next
trip out, the pilot and I both fell asleep on the way to Res Bay – the autopilot worked beautifully until
we ran out of fuel. The silence woke us both up and after flipping
to auxiliary tanks, the engines caught and we stayed aloft, and
awake, for the rest of the journey. After one more rotation,
the job was packed up, and I returned to the office. Our house
was finally built that winter – there was someone in charge
again. I did the wiring, insulation, inside paneling, and roofing
in my spare time.
King Resources
went bankrupt shortly after. John King was
charged with fraud when a mutual
fund found some King Resources properties "went missing".
He was given one year in bail. This was
big news at the time, but small potatoes compared to Worldcom
and Enron two decades later.
I had loaned them my photos for inclusion
in their annual report. None appeared in print and the photos
were never returned.
The irony is, of course, that there never was any sulphur worth
mining. Two men with two shovels could have demonstrated that
the surface deposit was only inches thick. The source, too, was
obvious – the yellow streaks on the surface led directly to the
base of the gypsum dome. Oh well, it was a very interesting and
educational project.
People remember the first moon walk in 1969. Few remember that Intel invented
the first microchip CPU, and the precursor to the Internet (ARPANET)
appeared that same year.
In the fall of 1969, I was given an
opportunity I couldn't refuse
and I left the safety of Sproule for a much riskier venture in
Australia. Bill Anderson,
one of my bosses from my Schlumberger days, took over my position
at Sproule. Later,
Bill was responsible
for starting my independent consulting career.
Same small world.
Dr. Sproule
passed away in 1970, at the far too young age of 65, before his
dream of major oil and gas discoveries in the Arctic were finally
proven.
Sproule
and Associates survived, and is still considered the pre-eminent
resource evaluation consulting company in Canada.
Learning The Trade - Digitech
I would have been happy to stay at Sproule
for the rest of my career. But the headhunter who got me to Dome
phoned to see if I wanted to go to Australia.
Maybe. Probably. Yes!
After a short orientation at Digitech’s
Calgary facility, we were whisked
off to Sydney to help get the
Australian operation up and running. This was to be a modern geophysical
data processing business serving Australia and southeast Asia.
I was to be Managing Director. So we sold the MG’s,
packed the dishes, rented the Bragg Creek house, and set off
for further adventures.
I arranged
to finish a 3 year Business Development Certificate, started 2
and a half years earlier at University of Calgary, by correspondence. I passed
but the non-standard final exam, designed just for me, took nearly
three weeks to write – 20 essays on 20 business topics.
The exam would have taken two hours had I stayed in Calgary.
Digitech's Managing Director in Sydney, 1970
Digitech
in Sydney was exciting and hard work –
new computers, new people, new work ethic. The computers were
an EMR 6050 with an EMR 6130 to read tapes and drive the plotters.
EMR was a subsidiary of Schlumberger - you
just can't get away from those guys. We used a motor-generator set to convert the 50 Hz current to
60 Hz to keep the computation cycle speed up to its design specs.

There
were perks: Doyle's Seafood at Watson Bay and my house rented on
Camp Cove Beach
Business
went well during the first year. Dave Robson was a great mentor
and Sydney was a great city to live in. I traveled to the capital cities; Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth,
Darwin, Brisbane, Canberra – each
had its own list of oil companyy and
government contacts. New Plymouth,
Auckland, Wellington,
Queenstown, even the top of Mount Cook, the
highest peak in New Zealand. Jakarta, and Singapore
were also on the tour. These still had open, running
sewers on both sides of most streets – crossing these at
night on narrow cement planks was no fun at all.

Day sailors
on Sydney Harbour and Tall Ships to celebrate the Bi-Centennial
In
Jakarta,
we dined on an authentic Dutch East
Indies ristaffle with about
10 courses in an early colonial mansion. On another trip, we ate
at a restaurant on stilts about a mile from shore, returning in
pitch-black to a waiting rickshaw.
In Singapore, the night-out was spent
with business associates at the bars of Boogie Street – not a good place
for good boys at night. We also worked the daylight hours
contacting potential clients.
My early
trips to
Jakarta
in 1970 were just as
the Russian influence in the area was declining.
Suharto replaced Sukarno as President in a military coup in
1967, murdering thousands of Communists and possibly a million
ethnic Chinese. There were many
abandoned construction projects, all blamed on the pull-out of
Russian contractors. The streets were a riot of rickshaws,
taxis, mud, and water. People defecated into,
and then washed themselves and their clothes, in the open
sewers. After a monsoon rain, this seemed practical, but after a
dry spell, I was astounded to see the habit continuing.
 
On more recent trips in 2001 and 2002,
everything is paved, there are no open sewers, and the freeways
and hotels look like Houston. It’s
amazing what oil money can buy, at least close to the seat of
power. The Shangri-La is the place to stay
today. However, political unrest, student demonstrations,
murders of ethnic Chinese, and terrorist bombings continue.
Visitors are warned to keep a low profile.
Back in
Australia, John Boyd
came in as second-in-command later in 1970 and was instrumental
in raising the quality of our staff and our processing. Rick Bogehold kept the software in shape. Dave Pratt ran the
mineral exploration side of the business. All three went on to
run their own independent processing centers in later years, John in Calgary,
Rick in Denver, and Dave in Sydney.
All three have recently retired but their businesses continue under
new names and management.
Then came
the Australian Federal election. The new Labour government ran
the foreign oil companies out of town and made it difficult for
local firms to raise capital. Seismic crew activity dropped to
near zero. The rig count dropped to less than a dozen. Digitech hadn’t the resources to carry on in Sydney. I tried to raise
capital in Australia
but realistic forecasts made the outcome pretty obvious. I finally
had to lay everyone off and oversee the auction of all the assets.
Sydney
had been Paradise. We were regaled by fabulous weather, gorgeous
beaches, fine food, and a cosmopolitan atmosphere that Calgary lacked. We saw
the tall ships come in from the sea for the bicentennial of Captain
Cook’s discovery of Australia.
We watched the fireworks over the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
We partied on the beaches and enjoyed a very active social life.
Just watching the sailboats on the Harbour
was a thrill to the eye, not to mention the bare beginning of
the topless bathing craze.
Bondi Beach
There was
a bit of trouble in Paradise,
too. The Viet Nam
War was slowly building toward its debacle and the Aussie men
were tired of the US
troops snagging their women while on R&R. Australian troops
were also in-country and it all made for some ugly demonstrations
and newspaper rhetoric. We weren’t directly affected except
when we were mistaken for Americans while shopping or at a bar.
A Maple Leaf on the lapel helped, but it wasn’t the universal
symbol of sanity that it is today.
Although I
initially had a company car in Sydney, I abandoned it for a 1947
MG-TC, wire wheels and all. It cost $800 and could be used all
year in the NSW climate. I sold it before I returned for $900. How dumb
can you be? It was worth 10 times its cost here in Canada had I
thought to ship it home.
I returned
with the other Canadians to work in the Calgary office as VP Operations. I had the
task of overseeing all programming and computer center operations
– about 35 people in all. I hired the first female computer
operator in Calgary
and the first female computer programmer in Digitech.
There was shock and horror but they worked out just fine. This
was pre-Gloria Steinem.

An anonymous
Univac
1108 
We also got new
computers - a Univac 1108 replaced the EMR 6050. Cmdr. Grace Hopper,
a computer science pioneer and legend, and a US Naval Officer,
showed up for the inauguration of our 1108. In full dress Naval
uniform (she never appeared in public any other way), she held court
at a Digitech reception for clients. "Formidable !" as the
French would say.
Like most
other mainframe manufacturers, UNIVAC survived a few mergers and
divestitures, to disappear completely in the early 1980's. Dinosaurs
cannot survive the meteoric impact of the mini-computer, now more
popularly known as the personal computer.

The VP Operations, 1972
During
an expansion in 1972, Digitech took
prime tenancy in a new building. I was assigned to oversee the
special facilities needed for the computers, and nearly died while
doing it. For weeks, I had been walking up to the second floor
to inspect progress. The stairs were unlighted and the second
floor had no windows. One day, I headed for the stairs, but felt
a draft and stopped. The stairs weren’t there! I nearly
walked off into empty space. It turned out the stairs failed a
fire inspection and had been jack-hammered away – no barricade
was put up. Just one of the hazards of poor vision.
Shortly
after, we moved all the computers out the windows of the old building
with a crane, trucked them to the new building, and craned them
up to a hatch in the second floor wall. The
second floor location was a security measure - there had been
several bombings of computer centers in the USA and one in
Canada. Ludites are everywhere! Remember: Darwin
was wrong - not the fittest but the most adaptable win the race.
Thirty-six hours later,
we were up and running.
The control console and some of the tape drives
in the new Digitech center in Calgary 
We also took control of Computer Data
Processors Ltd and moved all their equipment to the new building. CDP was Roy Lindseth’s first major
business venture and there had been tremendous rivalry between
Digitech and CDP. Roy
went on to an illustrious consulting career .
We also
installed the first remote job entry terminal outside the computer
center. I can’t claim much credit for this as Univac and
Texaco were the prime instigators. However, the negotiations
with the telephone company to get a full duplex, uninterruptible
line that was clean enough to carry 300 bits per second for at
least one mile was the daunting
task assigned to me. Took a while to make it all
work.
At Digitech,
I was un-promotable – I was one
of 3 VP’s and the Pres was not going to croak any time soon.
I left Digitech in 1973 to travel some more.
Digitech
went bankrupt in 1979, but the name carried on for a few years
under new owners. Ben Berg went on to develop a business to scan
pre-digital seismic sections and maps – scanning was a new and
emerging technology in 1979,
Dave Robson
took over Calgary based R. Cruz and Associates, changed the
name to Veritas, and grew it into a world class giant in seismic acquisition and
processing. Rafael Cruz moved back to Texas and is the father
of Ted Cruz, who ran in the 2016 Republican primaries. Ted was born
in Calgary -- it would have been interesting to see if he would have
had the same problem proving his American citizenship as President
Obama did.
After Dave retired from Veritas in
2004, he formed a private equity business. Shortly after,
Veritas merged with CGG, the result now known as CGG-Veritas. (CGG
was born in 1931 by Schlumberger, with a number of small French
firms and banks, combining their various geophysical methods and
licenses into a single independent company. Schlumberger sold its
interest in CGG in the early 1950's).
!! Now it's 1973 - about to head to the Arctic Islands,
found a comsulting business in Calgary, and build a Hereford ranch
from scratch in Central Alberta. Time flys when you stay busy.
Flying On My Own – Crain and Associates
Bill Anderson, mentioned in dispatches earlier in
this narrative, was flying to the Arctic
for Sproule to supervise logging operations
for PanArctic Oils. In 1973, Bill wanted
out from this to spend more time with a growing family. His decision
led me to my consulting career, as I took over the job, working
under my own name.
This work
expanded quickly and other clients came on board, so E. R. Crain
and Associates Ltd was born.
It started as a one-man operation, with one major client, PanArctic
Oils Ltd. and some much smaller one-off analysis projects. The
PanArctic work involved traveling to the rigs in the Canadian Arctic
Islands to supervise logging crews and do a petrophysical analysis,
then radio the results to Calgary. Word spread and soon I was
supervising jobs in the Deep Basin of Alberta and even a few deeper
wells in Saskatchewan. In less than 2 years, I needed help to cover
all the work.
Dave Curwen
joined as an Associate in 1975. Bob Bigg
and Kelly Woronuk joined in 1976,
and Ian Norquay followed in 1978. They
handled all the Alberta Deep
Basin and
foothills field supervision jobs, while Dave and I worked both
field and office consulting. In 1981, Dave left to follow his
own path in the oil industry with American Hunter, Canadian
Hunter, and finally Suncor. Bill Clow
joined in 1982 and is currently an independent consultant in
Calgary.
Joan Reinbold, Vickie Sels, and Bob Agar ran the
computers, and Debi Gray typed the reports and kept the books. This group of professionals was probably the best
team of petrophysicists ever assembled in Canada.
Kelly worked
from his farm at Rycroft, Bob from home
in Grande Prairie, Ian from Selkirk, Manitoba, Dave from Vernon
BC (on his motorcycle in good weather), I worked from Bragg Creek,
and Bill, the sensible one, actually lived in Calgary. Bill
Cuttress and Arne Matiisen hung their hats briefly in our shop
while they were between other ventures.
Upon leaving
Digitech, I had bought a brand-new 1973 Mustang II hatchback in
silver and black with red leather interior - very macho looking, but
a little bit gutless even with a V-6. It was the first "new" car I
ever purchased with my own money. I put 250,000 miles on this car
before it rusted off its frame. I also picked up another MG-TD,
over-priced and needing some TLC. I later sold it to a fellow petrophysicist, Case Struyk, who stripped it to its last nut and
bolt and has nearly finished the restoration, 35 years after
acquiring it.
You might wonder
why all these side trips into automobiles. You have to appreciate
that I was going blind, slowly but surely. When would it be bad
enough to terminate the privilege of driving? Well the answer was
"soon". I quit driving at night in 1979 and quit driving altogether
in 1985. One of the greatest feelings of loss is not the loss of
vision, but the loss of independence when you give up driving
yourself when and where you want.
One of
the first non-PanArctic jobs
in my consulting career was, believe
it or not, for Digitech. Before I left
Digitech, I had put together a proposal for a seismic
processing center in Beijing
for the Chinese government. When it came time to present the proposal,
I was invited to join Don Simpson and two others from Control
Data.
Teahouse
in the park and colonial style hotel,
Shanghai 1974
<== Hong Kong Harbour from Victoria Peak
We
entered China by way of Hong Kong, still under British rule at the
time. Then a train to Canton,
walk across the border, train to Shanghai,
plane to Beijing.
This last was a Russian equivalent to the DC–8, but it had
six motors instead of four – the Russian metallurgy was
heavier than the Western version, so they needed more power to
lift the load. This was a few months after
President Nixon “opened China to the
West”. Nixon later resigned after
impeachment proceedings were begun due to his lies and evasions
about the Watergate burglaries.
We were shown all the tourist sites before tourists were allowed
into the country. We saw the Forbidden City,
Summer Palace, Ming Tombs, Tien-en-men Square, the Great
Wall, and the diplomats’ department store, all with our
personal guide and a translator.
Fancy-dress dinners were toasted with a potent
brew called Mao-Tai, downed straight in one gulp to the cry of "Gombai",
equivalent to "Skoll" or "Cheers".
We could walk anywhere we wanted
but accidentally found Chairman Mao’s compound. We were
politely shooed away. It was February,
it was cold, and the smog from a few million soft coal space heaters
was more than most throats could bear. There were no private
cars in Beijing in 1974, a few buses, a few Government cars, and a
few million bicycles. Compare that to today's modern Beijing,
created from scratch in less than 40 years.
Entrance to
Forbidden City
Near Ming Tombs
Inside Forbidden City

Tien-en-men Square 1974
Our presentation
went well but we wondered how our hosts knew
when to get the right
people gathered for each phase of the process, without asking.
We realized the rooms had to be bugged so we started doing our
planning sessions while out walking. Suddenly the pictures in
each of our rooms were changed and they started asking us what
would be presented next. No one lost face.
The French
and Germans were our competition. The Canadian government was
not prepared to offer sufficient guarantees for the project. The
French company CGG got the job. The
French had learned years ago that politics and business are
intimately intertwined. Canada hasn't figured that out even
today.
Just before
we left, we met a fellow who was training Chinese technicians
on maintenance of Boeing 727’s. He had to teach all topics
to all trainees – hydraulics, electronics, engines, you
name it. No one was allowed to be a specialist, but none of the
trainees could grasp all of an airplane’s complex systems.
This man was not allowed to leave China
(he said) until everyone was trained – he had been there
six months already and showed serious signs of mental illness.
And he was by himself – no helpers, no family, no way out.
Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get the contract.
The China trip was quite a sidebar and consulting contacts
needed attention, especially PanArctic, so let's get back on
track.
The
PanArctic contract ran until the PetroCanada takeover around 1984.
From the very beginning in 1973, the work involved a highly
integrated petrophysical analysis of each well, performed first at
the well site, then more rigorously in the office. All geological
data (sample descriptions, mud logs, cores, regional geology,
special core analysis), engineering data (drill stem and production
test recoveries, pressure transient results, capillary pressure data), and
geophysical data (basin maps, local structure) were integrated
during the petrophysical analysis.
Integrated
petrophysics was not well known or qppreciated in the 1970s, as
shown by this editorial cartoon in the Calgary Herald sometime
in 1978. It appeared after PanArctic's president, Charles
Hetherington, told the Chamber of Commercr that PanArctic
had identified 1.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the
High Arctic. This estimate grew 10 fold over time. Sadly, the
gas may never reach the LNG market as the area is comsidered to
be environmentally sensitive.
That's me in my parka and insulated boots peering into a
borehole, with my unscrambled radio phone near at hand to
transmit the good news from each well. ==>
Bob Meneley, Diego Henao,
and Servi Smaltx at PanArctic were easy to work
witj, and were very receptive to the integrared approach.
I had kept a sample of the oil discovered while I was Project
Nanager for J. C. Sproule on a King Resources sulphur
exploration job on Melville Island back in 1969. In 1973, I
donated it to Bob Meneley. Nothing much was said at the time,
but 35+ years later Bob quotes this oil discovery in some of his
technical papers as evidence for more oil plays to be found near
other piercement domes in the Arctic. He forgot to credit me
with the gift of this oil sample, my one and only claim to be a
real Oil Baron.
There were about 20 significant gas and oil discovery wells
drilled in the High Arctic and I supervised logging and analysis
on 17 of them. Another 140 deliniation and wildcat dry holes
were drilled before 1986, and I worked about 100 of them. One
trip was about 700 miles from the North Pole at 80.75 degrees
north latitude; few people can claim that on their resume.
My
petrophysical analysis in 1973 was done on the first
pocket-sized programmable
calculator ever invented – the HP-45. It had memory for
49 program steps and 7 registers to hold input data, parameters,
and answers. Imagine – a complete log analysis program in
just 49 steps! Later, we moved up to the HP
41C and TI 59, giving
us the equivalent of 400 steps and a dozen registers. Wow!
This was sufficient for all the field supervision and analysis
jobs for our clients. Far superior to slide rules and chart
books, the about to be obsolete technology of the time.
 Computer
log analysis for PanArctic was done
using Schlumberger’s Saraband
and Coriband programs. With my direction, Computrex
digitized and plotted the core data on a scale that would directly
overlay the Saraband plot.
This was the first time log and core data
were integrated in a clear visual manner.
1974 core data
display and Saraband log analysis
Bob Everett
ran most of the Saraband jobs at the Schlumberger data center in Calgary. He was a sharp engineer – I had been
one of his trainers when he was stationed at Swift Current. Bob
went on to Schlumberger Ridgefield, later to GRI in Austin, and
now consults from Vancouver Island
BC.
1974 core data
display and Saraband log analysis
We also ran
dipmeter and directional surveys in most wells, also processed in
Calgary. Since the surveys were run close to the magnetic North
Pole, magnetic compass directional surveys were useless and
gyro-compasses were used. The survey was "closed" by logging all the
way in and out of the borehole - that could take up to 30 hours.
Gyro drift and earth's rotation were distributed mathematically to
make the closure error equal to zero.
Sperry-Sun
direction surveys were also run while drilling. They never agreed
with the Schlumberger surveys. The problem was that they did not run
a closed survey, choosing instead to run short "add-on" survey
segments to earlier surveys. The accumulated errors were huge and
directional information was grossly different than the closed
surveys. No amount of discussion could convince Sperry to run a
closed survey to confirm their errors. Today, everyone uses
3-axis accelerometers for this, and all surveys are closed.

The major discoveries in the High Arctic, shaded blue. Many of the
100+ wells I
travelled to required two trips each, ranging from 2 to
10 days per trip. One trip lasted 23 days.
A composite
report was generated in 1977, covering all Arctic wells drilled to
that date, and maintained as new wells were
drilled. The report included 70 pages of text, 150 illustrations,
and over 1000 pages of supporting data, as well as a wall of file cabinets with
original and computed log prints, and a room full of magnetic tapes.
This was the first of a great many integrated petrophysical reports
to follow over the next 40 years.
 
An
Arctic taxi cab:
Foremost/Nodwell Delta 3
That's me at left, waiting for a ride on a Twin Otter
I made
about 200 flights to the
High Arctic
on PanArctic's Lockheed Electras and later PWA’s
727 cargo birds, 7 to 8 hours each way, counting layovers. Then
a Twin Otter to the airstrip nearest the rig. Then a Nodwell
or chopper to the rig. Then check in, find a bunk, find the loggers,
find the wellsite geologist, find the drilling supervisor, find
the radio operator, and most important, find the kitchen. All
of this at 45 below and in the dark of an Arctic night. Not bad
for a blind man, I told myself.
There
was always the risk of Polar Bears, so each rig came equipped
with a guard
dog. One very dark blizzard, I was following the rope out to the
rig from camp. About halfway, when both camp and rig were out of
sight in the snow, I heard a snuffling sound behind me. “Oh
shit” I said, “I’m done for, now”. It was the dog,
not the bear.
There was
a problem bear at Rae Point
with a cub. They were captured, tranked,
and sent to the Calgary
Zoo. I was told they were on the same plane as I was on, going
south. I never saw the cargo half of the plane so I can’t
vouch for the truth of it.
Scary thought.

Rae
Point Base Camp Lockheed Electra Boeing
727 Rig at Work
PanArctic
lost 28 men in a plane crash when CF-PAB went through the ice
on approach to Rae Point
base camp. Most perished of hypothermia on the ice. I had come
out the day before and went back the day after. Everyone wore
their parka and boots for the entire 5 hour flight, just in case. No one
spoke. Inside three weeks, everything was back to normal but not
entirely forgotten.
INVENTING LOG/MATE
By 1976,
it was obvious that there must be a better method than programmable
calculators, and cheaper and faster than Saraband,
for large scale log analysis projects in the office. But there
wasn’t – some main-frame computer programs at service
bureaus and a few time-share systems existed. I had written some
of them myself, beginning in 1964, but they were slow, cumbersome,
and very unfriendly.
By chance,
in mid-1976, I saw a demo of the HP9825 “calculator”.
It had 4000 bytes of random access memory and a digital cassette
tape drive built-in that had a 250K capacity.
The operating system lived in a separate 24K ROM, leaving the
RAM available for programs and data.
There was also an 11 by 17 inch flat-bed
plotter. Shazam! The first desktop
micro-computer
system for log analysis was born. It was fast. It was small. It was portable.
It was friendly. It was LOG/MATE! All prior systems were
either mainframe or time-share (to a mainframe), which were not fast,
not portable, and definitely not friendly, with turnaround of many
hours or days.
|
We had looked at other so-called mini-computers
before choosing the HP9825, a true micro-computer. The Digital
Equipment PDP-8 had been around for many years but their version
of "portable" was not really true. The last PDP-8 was sold in
1979, and the model was never replaced with a more modern
micro-computer.
To illustrate further the need to anticipate
technology trends, Ken Olsen, founder and president of DEC, lost
his job in 1992, partly because he still refused to recognize
the market for person computers. He is reported to have
announced that there would "never be a need for a computer
in
the home". DEC did not survive Olsen's shortsighted
management, and DEC was broken up and sold, the computer group
going to Compaq in 1998, later absorbed by Hewlett Packard in
2002.
To put Olsen's comment in context, Thomas Watson, president
of IBM said in 1950 that there would "never be a need for
more than 5 computers worldwide", and that they would never
weigh less than 1.5 tons. Watson and IBM survived this lack
of vision, but one wonders how.
Worst case of poor vision? Ronald Wayne, co-founder of Apple
Inc, who sold his 1/3 interest for $800 in 1977. |
A digitizer
and dual 5-1/4 inch 250Kb floppy disc drive were soon available, then
a decent printer. By today’s standards, these were expensive
and primitive, but there was nothing else like it on the market
for many years. More importantly, plug-in ROMs for
scientific functions and Fast Fourier Transforms were available,
allowing us to write compact, fast code for log analysis and seismic
modeling that could not be done in any other micro-computer.

The HP 9825 computer and HP9872 4-colour pen plotter, shown with log
analysis crossplot and full colour depth plot in
1976, 5 years before IBM "invented" the PC. This was the
first time that log analyses could be presented in colour with tops,
tests, cored intervals, and core analysis results overlaid on the
log analysis.
Dave Curwen
and I programmed this calculator turned computer to do everything
a mainframe program could do, and then some.
We used a lot of mathematical tricks with integer and fraction parts
of numbers to save memory space, just as I had done with the HP-45
calculator.
The
Apple II was introduced in April 1977. It differed from its major
rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because it came with color
graphics. They were all too little and too late to solve our needs
and were not capable of scientific work for several more years.
Apple, of course, has survived and so has HP. They both have
adjusted and adapted to changes in technology trends.
Bill Gates was starting Microsoft by 1976,
but we were totally unaware of this, the third world-changing event
in my lifetime, after the Intel microchip and ARPANET.
It was not until 1981 that IBM married the
Intel chip and Microsoft operating system in the first IBM-PC model
5150. We had our HP system doing useful work 5 years earlier.
And it wasn't until 1985 that the IBM-PC/AT, with an 80286
processor, could catch up to the HP 9800 series in scientific
calculation capability. In reality, LOG/MATE was 9 years ahead of
the technology train.
Office consulting expanded rapidly with the LOG/MATE
system as the backbone of many projects, large and small.
Staff grew to 5 full-time
professionals, 3 full-time technicians, a
secretary / book keeper, and several part-time technicians
and programmers.
Flying On My Own – Log/Mate Limited
The “Friendly
Log Analysis System” had many friends – 40 systems
were sold between 1976 and 1982. In 1978, E. R. Crain and Associates Ltd
changed its name to Log/Mate Limited to reflect the new
nature of the business.
The boss at a CSPG Convention
in 1979
Log/Mate Inc and Log/Mate Services Inc
were opened in Denver the same year, under the guidance of Monte
Fryt.
Monte Fryt, 1980
After the LOG/MATE daze, Monte continued his professional career
with Anchutz, Hunter, and others in Denver, EOG in Midland, and is
now happily retired...
LOG/MATE,
and later LOG/MATE PLUS, pioneered the practical use of Holgate plots to calibrate log to core data, as well as
the “4-D Plot” using a symbol to represent the Z axis
and colour to represent the W axis on a conventional X – Y crossplot. The use of colour could illuminate rough hole
conditions, shale volume, lithology, or anything else the analyst
desired.
HP hardware
continued to evolve and the 9825 became a 9826, then 9836, 9845, and
eventually the HP320 series, each with more memory,speed, display
capabilities, and language features.

The LOG/MATE PLUS,desktop log analysis
system as delivered in 1981 with an HP 9826 or 9836 computer and other peripherals

LOG/MATE 4-D crossplot, depth plot, and
composite Holgate plot - features
never duplicated on any
petrophysical system.

Another first in 1976, LOG/MATE printouts were neat, legible,
page-sized, and
reproducible. Prior to this, listings were made on large format
chain printers. Results were filed in special binders and the
individual sheets could not be copied in conventional copiers.

With scissors and tape, we built log analysis cross-sections in
colour long before software was available for the purpose. This
is a more modern example, but you get the idea.
.
Thousands
of wells were processed through LOG/MATE by our staff in Calgary, in addition
to those run by oil companies with their own systems. We couldn’t
have done it without our support staff: Bob Agar, Joan Reinbold,
Vicki Sels, Debi
Gray, and other part time help
We added
seismic modeling capabilities for some clients in 1981,
using the built in Fast Fourier Transform ROM of the HP9800
series,
and cash flow analysis for
others. These features were very popular and added materially to
the concept of "Integrated Petrophysics" that we were trying to
promote.

Our seismic
modeling concept included a quick-look approach to modeling the
effect of gas on sonic and density data that was required for the
then popular "bright-spot" technique for seismic interpretation.
With John Boyd as co-author, we won Best Paper of the Year award for
this work from CSEG in 1981. These models tended tp produce
surprising results, which of course was the point of the whole
exercise.
Synthetic seismogram and log analysis on a 2-way time scale
created with the LOG/MATE system -- the first ever made on
a desktop computer.
Integration of core,
test, and formation top data was
always part of the basic system, a foretaste of the integrated
software to come 25 years later. And all of this ran in 24 Kb
memory - try to do that today!
Mapping
of petrophysical properties was added ln 1982, but not pursued
as vigorously as possible, mainly due to the looming financial
crisis, high interest rates (24%), and receivables running at
180+ days. The
mapping code was written by my brother, Ian Crain, under
contract to Log/Mate Limited. Ian was an
expert in geographical information systems (GIS). He and his
wife worked on many GIS projects in Canada, Africa, and Europe.
They retired from active consulting in 2017.
Beginning in
1978, I started teaching courses and seminars on integrated
petrophysics, both in-house and in open-sessions in our office space
on 8th Avenue.
The Boss as Instructor, 1980
Our crowning
achievement was the installation, in 1981, of a multi-computer,
shared-resource LOG/MATE system for oil sands analysis at the
Alberta
Energy Resources Conservation Board. If
"shared-resource" doesn't mean anything to you, think "mass
storage disc drives connected to multiple PC workstations" (not time-share mainframes with
dumb-terminals).
There was little
time for travel except to Arctic and other remote well sites. But
the SPWLA Convention in 1980 was in Mexico City. I took a week at
Zihuatanejo
on the west coast near Ixtapa. Cervesa, civeche, and hot sun on the
beach washed away seven years of stress - missed a day of the
Convention, too. A tame bull-fight, Mariachi music, and great food
were supplied in plenty.
One of the
side-effects of retinitus pigmentosa is often early-onset cataracts.
After the Mexico trip, the cataracts were surgically removed and
replaced with plastic lens implants. This eliminated the need for
reading-glasses - one less hassle in a hassle-full life.
PARALLEL Track - A
SMALL Piece of Paradise
On the personal side, I had
purchased a vacant quarter section south and west of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, in 1976. This was partly
in response to the phony energy crisis of 1973 – 1976 and partly
just to get-away.

My home for 40 years with Herefords in the front pasture. Click
image to take a pictorial side track, but be sure to come back --
there's more fun and games to come.

Cover girls from the Rocking R
Ranch
Over the next 3 years, I cleared the scrub,
built a house and finally moved from Bragg Creek in 1978.
I laid up most of the logs myself, but had 2 carpenters do the
roof and finish carpentry. Being an electrical engineer, I wired
the house myself, setup a 4 KW wind generator, and charged re-claimed
telephone office batteries. The ranch was, and still is, 3 miles
from the nearest power line and nearest neighbour. The wind generator
died of fatigue and old age in 2001 and was
replaced by a 4000 watt solar array, later upgraded to a more
effient 8000 watt system.
From
1979 to 2005, we
raised purebred Hereford bulls and replacement females for commercial ranchers and
other purebred breeders. We
were told that our stock was "one of the best kept secrets
in the Hereford industry". Our bulls were Maternal Trait
Leaders and their superior genetics showed in all the progeny..

Aerial view of the ranch
looking North, with North Saskatchewan River in far background.
If it looks smooth and green, it's because I helped nature make
it
t
hat
way.
See the whole story
HERE
and watch the Slide Show HERE.
!!
It is 1982 - the economic turmoil of early through late 1980s takes
its toll on small business. Rocky roads ahead!
Grounded – D&S Petrophysical
In 1982, the oil industry began to slump and interest rates had
reached 24% on secured bank loans. Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Policy was in full effect, sucking billions of
dollars from Alberta oil companies into Federal coffers. Our clients were not paying
on time, and the handwriting was on the wall. My old alma mater,
Dome Petroleum, was the worst debtor of them all, with receivables
heading past 180 days.
We did get paid eventually,
but it was close.
Trudeau brought
us the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 as well, but
it didn't help the oil industry. It didn't even guarantee the right
to own property and still hasn't been fixed.
I
felt fortunate
to sell the assets and on-going business of Log/Mate Limited to
D&S Petroleum Consulting Group Ltd in mid-1982 and continued as their
Petrophysical Manager until 1986. D&S took on all our staff,
but several were laid-off as the business climate continued to
decline.
At D&S, we migrated LOG/MATE PLUS
to LOG/MATE ESP, still on HP computers, but with the aim to move
onto the “new-fangled” IBM/PC. Although it arrived
in 1981, the PC wasn’t powerful enough to consider until
the IBM/PC-AT showed up in 1985.

LOG/MATE PLUS and LOG/MATE ESP output to paper was identical and
included tops, tests, and core data along with the petrophysical
analysis results. The difference was in the Graphical User
Interface (GUI) that allowed the image to appear on the screen
in colour. Dave Jaques wrote our ESP GUI himself, and combined
with the functions keys on the HP keyboard, provided the best
human interface to a computer available at that time.

Colour CRT images from LOG/MATE ESP in 1984.

HP 9836 computer with colour monitor and built-in
floppy discs in 1984 - an
IBM-PC capable
of quantitative log analysis didn't show up for another year.
With a
joint venture agreement between D&S and the Alberta Research Council,
LOG/MATE ESP was finished and considerable research on expert
systems and artificial intelligence for log analysis was undertaken.
The object of the research was LOG/MATE ESP ASSISTANT –
a knowledge-based expert system for log analysis that would assist
the analyst by helping to choose analysis parameters and algorithms
appropriate for the job at hand.
The CWLS awarded me Best Paper of the Year in 1985 for my
presentation on AI
concepts and rule based expert systems titled "A
Primer on Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems in the
Petroleum Industry".
Artificial
Intelligence: The
ability to use a computer to
make the same mistakes a
human can, only faster.
|
I was
officially the D&S Project Manager, but in fact had little autonomy.
Between the D&S money problems, and ARC's need to demonstrate
academic research, there was little room to actually build anything that
worked. We experimented with rule-based systems using LISP and ProLog, favourite programming languages of the AI fraternity.
Archaic and arcane, these were easily shown to be inferior to
conventional languages in coding rules for petrophysical analysis.
The D&S
team consisted of me,
Dave Jaques, Kathy Knill, Ken Edwards, and Ron
Jakeman; Lance Pepperdine was added later. ARC provided Bob Hipkin (an
ex-Schlumberger electronics wizard) as my counterpart, Lynn
Sutherland, Ken Gamble, several AI experts who floated in and out on
short term contracts, and Evie Einstein, a not-too-distant relative
of Albert himself.
This was a pretty powerful group and with fewer sidetracks up blind
alleys, the project might have gone more smoothly. Too many cooks,
not enough meat for the stew.
The continued
low prices for oil, and continued
repercussions from the NEP, hurt the prospects for the success of this
project and it was suspended in the fall of 1986. It was revived,
without my involvement, in mid 1987 and a product named INTELLOG
was delivered in 1988, based predominately on the ESP model and
my original AI research, augmented by a working rule base
developed by Einstein and Edwards. It took a year to get my severance pay
but I got it, at the doorway into the court room, moments before
the judge entered and only a few months before D&S closed its doors for good.
I have
often bemoaned the apparent lack of successful AI programs. Ray
Kurzweil explained this in 1990 in his book "The Age of Intelligent
Machines".- It seems that when an AI program is successful, it's not AI
any more, just smart
coding. So you don't hear much about AI today. However AI is in wide
use, especially in applications that can use "machine learning"
to gather knowledge from "Big Data" on the Internet and in
particular your shopping habits and social media postings.
Beware, Big Brother IS watching.
If
you would like to try some AI, see if you can write a set of
rules that can distinguish between the three critters at the
left, then see if the critter on the right can be identified by
the same rules. What distinguishes a horse from a cow from a
baby calf? Once trained, a human has no problem. When I was
young, horses were attached to wagons, cows were not, so it took
a while to differentiate a horse from a cow when both were
grazing in a farmer's field.
One
personal success was the publication of my 700 page hardcover
petrophysical textbook "The Log Analysis Handbook" by Pennwell Books
in 1986. It was the first textbook to incorporate "computer-ready
math".
Academics moaned but log analysts loved it.
D&S
was not a pleasant place to work. My desk was searched, I was
screamed at by other managers, tension was very high, inter-departmental
jealousy at fever-pitch, departmental
accounting overstated expense and overhead, understated income,
R&D tax credits were shaky. Sounds like a miniature
version of Enron. I was warned of this at our
"welcoming" party by one of the managers;
it was a little too late to back out then.
D&S
management never understood the integrated project concept, so the seismic,
cash flow, and mapping functions were dropped from ESP. The turf
wars were terrific and no function that could
or might be done by another
department was allowed on our system -- another example of
Enron-like bad management. What a waste!
They also
failed to foresee the impact of PC’s and were reluctant
to pursue “non-conventional” desktop workstations,
preferring instead mainframes and dumb terminals. This meant that resources
for ESP were constantly under attack, even suspended from time-to-time.
Al Gorrel, a friend and mentor from my
earliest days in the oil patch, was killed in a terrorist attack
on a hotel in Manila, on 12 February 1985 while he was on a mission for
the United Nations.
I dedicated my textbook in Al's memory when it was published in
1986.
I attended Al's funeral
in Calgary but the memory was somewhat spoiled when a D&S accountant tried to deduct 4 hours from my monthly
contract fee for leaving to attend "without permission".
He didn't win, of course, because a contract is a contract and it
didn't specify how many hours I had to work each month. That man
is now a tax compliance supervisor. That figures! Where else
could he find more esoteric rules to enforce?
D&S
was wound-up in 1989 and re-surfaced briefly under new ownership in
1992, but INTELLOG was essentially dead, with only two sales and
no meaningful support.
Maybe if Ted denHartog and Bill Fisher had tended to D&S business instead of
gambling, and losing, in Calgary real estate, D&S might have
survived intact. Maybe not; the National Energy Policy really
did shut down the oil industry for several years, and the
D&S anarchistic management styles, clinging to obsolete software
and hardware, might never have been overcome.

Interlude – Husky Oil
Meanwhile, back at the ranch,
in October 1987 Ed Klovan offered me a petrophysical job with Husky Oil.
Ed was a well respected geologist and university
professor, now looking after the geological needs of the Heavy Oil
group. I thought this was a great idea, to
avoid the ups-and-downs of the consulting business. Petrophysical
analysis of new wells and teaching Husky staff about log analysis
were my main duties. I was told by the Chief Geologist that there
would be no "projects" so it was hard to integrate other scientific
data into the analysis, or to compare new wells to their brethren in
the same area.
Some time later, the company was reorganized into "pods" which
represented different disciplines, so all the petrophysicists ended
up working together, three floors away from their "customers", the
geologists and engineers who needed the work done. Sadly, a lot of
direct communication between disciplines was lost. The project-team
approach was still too novel a concept for the MBA-minded upper
echelon.
I got “merged-out” in October 1988. It turned out that while I was
the most senior of the four petrophysicists in the merger with Canterra, I had the
least seniority with only one year of service. So much for
avoiding ups-and-downs.
Calgary hosted
the 1988 Winter Olympics. The city won great praise for its handling
of the affair, as well as for the warm reception given to the
visitors. "Eddie the Eagle" made his debut on the high jump but
failed to qualify for further honors. The Jamaican bob-sled team
also failed to win, but were honoured none-the less for their valiant
attempt. The organizing committee didn't lose any money, much to the
distress of Montreal, who are still paying for the 1976 Olympics.
Husky?
Although it was
wholly-owned by Li Kai Sheng, a Hong Kong businessman, when I was
there, Husky became a publicly traded company with $80 billion in
assets worldwide. After a take-over by MEG Energy in 2017, it motors
on as one of Canada's two integrated oil companies.
Ed Klovan and I met again on several occasions while working as
independent consultants on the same projects. We didn't spend much
time reminiscing about the "good-ol' daze" at Husky.
!! Now we are in the recovery of the 1990s, headed for
30 years of progress and prosperity with only minor meltdowns along
the way to the Covid pandemic of 2020 - 2022+. The Internet held
great promise but social media has made rational human discourse
nearly impossible. I worked from my ranch home 30 years before it
became fashionable, keeping me sane in an increasingly insane world.
Keep scrolling - things get interesting!
Flying On My Own Again – Spectrum 2000 Mindware
- Part 1
I had started a new petrophysical
business, Spectrum 2000 Mindware Ltd. In 1984 to contract the
D&S work, and re-activated it in 1988. Oil prices revived,
the NEP was dead, and business boomed, thanks to contract work from SSI,
GeoQuest,
ECL, CMG, Teknica, Rakhit,
Shawa and other engineering and geological
consulting firms, not to mention a few government agencies and
many oil and gas companies.
In 1989, the USSR broke up and the various Republics
became open to Western investment. We worked a number of projects
for Canadian firms looking at joint venture prospects in the Former Soviet Union
(FSU). Most were in Siberia but some were in other parts of Russia
and FSU Republics. Since the Soviet system directed discovery of
oil from afar, some field wells were purposely mis-correlated in
order to meet expectaions. These were easy to spot and fix for our
clients. Log presentations were truly obscure, verging on bizarre.
Data QC took a large fraction of the time compared to our more
conventional work.
In the 1990's, the major consulting firms Scientific Software Intercomp (SSI) and Teknica Overseas Ltd began contracting my
services for a long list of overseas and domestic jobs, some of
which are described below. Peter Stanton at SSI and Mickey Abougoush
at Teknica were very supportive and believed in intense integration
of the geosciences with reservoir engineering and reservoir
simulation disciplines. Ed Klovan, my boss while we were both at
Husky Oil, was Teknica's senior geologist on several of the
projects.
SSI was acquired by Baker Hughes in 1999 and their work
evaporated in 2002 as Baker personel took over the petrophysics. Teknica
quietly faded from view before 2008, after Libya could no longer pay
its bills.
By mid 1990, Rakhit Petroleun Consultants Ltd
(RPCL) found work for me on their regional studies in Canada and northern tier US
states. Kaush Rakhit, David Hume (later to become President of
Core Labs), and Neil Watson were great people to work with as
they were excellent
managers and fine geologists with an appreciation of how petrophysicql results could be integrated with geology and reservoir
engineering data.
RPCL was briefly sold to a gas exploration company, but
the deal was short lived and soon after Rakhit merged with Ed Fogg's Canadian
Discovery Ltd, CDL published a very well
respected techical review of current oil and gas discoveries and
exploration plays. Both the publishing and consulting arms are still operating.
Ed and Kaush are semi-retired; younger hands steer the ship.
Late in the 1990's, Greg Caswell of Exploitation Technology Inc (ETI)
started using my services in support of his reservoir simulation
projects. We had a lot of 3-way telephone calls and emails between
us and Greg's geologist in Denver, Scott Uttley, to resolve all the
incongruent interpretations of the data.
Finally, I was working with people who understood the value of
integrated, cross-discipline, geoscience. My yeats of "Learning the
Trade" were finally paying off.
Much of the remaining projects were for other consultants, those who did not
have a petrophysical specialist on their staff, Shawa, Hycal,
Brusset, Intera, Encal, Petresim, CMG, and Paladin were among them.
Unfortunately, with the exception of CMG, they did not survive much
past the end of 2003.
Technical
staff for these projects was hired on a contract basis and overhead
was kept to a minimum. I would not be trapped
by another oil industry recession. With PC’s, distributed processing
was a reality – each contractor could work at home if they
wished. Weekly breakfast meetings kept it all together and data
was transferred on diskettes. Today, we would use email for meetings
and data transfer – but the concept of distributed processing
was started long before the Internet became useful to ordinary
people.
The largest project in this era was
conducted as part of an integrated reservoir simulation conducted by
SSI on the oil fields of Kuwait. In all, 700 wells of the Burgan and
Ahmadi fields were analyzed,
just after the 1st Gulf War in 1991. It took 6 people
with 6 personal computers a year to deliver 4 tons of paper plots and detail
listings (they wanted five copies of everything). Joan
Voytechek,
Joan Reinbold, Doug Laing,
Allan Gunn, and Lorne Turner
stuck with me to achieve a really professional product. The Kuwaiti
clients visited
Calgary
several times. Two were women engineers, a rarity in the Muslim
world. The simulation ran very smoothly due to our careful
calibration of the log analysis to core and production history data.
When Kuwait was
finished, I took a tour of Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand with an extra week at the Royal Winter Fair in Sydney. The
tour contingent comprised McGill and Toronto alumni, all well-off
and pretty well retired. We were not-so-well-off and far from
retired, so it was a bit of a mis-match. On balance, it was a good vacation, especially
visiting my old haunts from 20 years earlier.
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Back marketing my services on the Convention circuit again, just
like the LOG/MATE days.
In 1994 I was elected an
Honorary Member of Canadian Well Logging Society for
contributions to the Society and to the petrophysical community.
I had been
CWLS
President in 1990-91, Treasurer in 1988 and 1989, and Publications
Chairman in 1981 and 1982. and had received Best Paper of
Year Award in 1985, I was also awarde a commemorative blanket
with the CWLS logo for conributions to the CWLS InSite technical
journal.
Many more
projects in Asia, North Africa, Australia, and
South
America followed. Some of these were mentoring or
forensic jobs, where my task was to solve the problem and let
others do the real work. A half-dozen
jobs involved mediating between an unhappy client and their equally
unhappy service provider. With good science, a modicum of diplomacy
(which I am not noted for), and a beard (denoting accumulated
wisdom), I managed to settle all
the disputes amicably.
On one such job,
I was called in after 3 months of "no progress" on a large study
being analyzed by a friend of mine. A half day of research revealed
he had been building the data base and had a complete analysis ready
to run on about 300 wells. We checked the code, ran a few test
wells, checked them, then pressed "Start" on the batch run. Next
day, we delivered the results. I was a hero, but they would have had
the same results without me. Just good timing.
Another involved
a clear case of misinterpretation of log analysis results. The
analysis itself was actually very well done but the interpretation
of these results by the consultant petrophysicist and geologist was wrong. The client knew the interpretation was wrong,
based on his knowledge of the oil field's performance. But some cultural differences and some
harsh words had prevented reconciliation. I spotted the error in a
moment. Integration of production, test data, core data, and sample
descriptions proved
my conclusion easily. Everyone backed off and smiles were soon on every
face. This was a case of zero communication between disciplines
within the consulting company, cross threaded with language and
cultural misunderstanding with the client representative. A couple
of project meetings with a clear agenda would have fixed this one
before the problem was ever noticed by the client.
Another cultural
problem occurred in Fort McMurray. The complaint was "noisy"
dipmeter data. The processing parameters had been changed between
one contract year and the next. The new data was better and more
useful than the old, but the geologist would have to work harder to
use it. The cultural problem? The geologist was a visible minority
and had suffered real, and probably imaginary, discrimination
for years. He wasn't about to listen to another slight on his skill
or ambition. No smiles this time, but the boss was happy as I had
independently confirmed his view of the situation.
The following
year, I was called back for another dipmeter problem. The logs had
dead spots with no data. One trip to the logging truck showed a
buildup of heavy oil on the electrodes, which the crew would wipe
off with diesel fuel. But then they would run back in, relogging the
previous interval and getting oiled up again -- no new interval could
ever get logged this way. So I asked "Why do you re-log the interval
you already have, instead of just the interval you need?" The answer
was a resounding "@#$@#", followed by a sheepish grin. Sometimes,
you can be too close to your own work to see the solution.
Some of
the more interesting analytical jobs were the fractured gas reservoirs in
Pakistan, gas in metamorphics in Indonesia,
Canada’s only fractured granite exploration well, Viet Nam’s
fractured granite at White Tiger (Bach Ho), laminated shaly sands
in Venezuela and Canada, and numerous shallow gas
and oil sands projects in
Canada.
My log analysis software vehicle was the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet.
I had developed a knowledge-based spreadsheet as early as 1985
to prototype some of the expert system concepts that were to go
into LOG/MATE ESP ASSISTANT.
With the
rapid growth in power of IBM-PC’s, my META/LOG PROFESSIONAL
spreadsheets became very practical. Copies were sold as a
stand-alone program for a number of years.
The depth
plotting program, LAS/PLOT, was written at my
request by Bill
Clow in 1987,
based on the features of
the original LOG/MATE program.
A
META/LOG analysis plotted with Bill Clow's LAS/PLOT software
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The “Meta”
in META/LOG stood for “beyond” log analysis, as we
were doing production prediction, cash flow, DST data analysis,
and core data analysis on the spreadsheet, along with the log analysis
results.
Only Case Struyk noticed that
Meta/Log was an anagram for Log/Mate - even I didn't notice until he
mentioned it.
About 50 META/LOG + LAS/PLOT
packages were sold before other low-cost software hit the market.
Active marketing of software ceased in 1991 when the consulting
practice became too busy to warrant the time needed for demos
and installs.
I made
several trips to
Bangladesh
with SSI, on projects paid for by CIDA, One was during Ramadan – no useful work was done
because fasting doesn’t leave much energy for attentive
discussion – much like trying to work during the Christmas
- New Year season in
Canada.
Another
was just after a killer typhoon with more than 100,000 dead littering
the swamp that is
Bangladesh.
The country was in mourning and little work was done. The running
joke was the story of a man with his wife huddled in the hotel
basement, waiting for the storm to abate, Thinking he was going
to die, he confessed to an infidelity. He didn’t die but
he did get a divorce.

Dhaka City - Old Fortress Megna River Bridge
Old Dhaka
On another
trip, I visited a logging job about 70 Km from
Dakka – we were obliged to be back before dark to
avoid bandits. In Dhaka, we visited
the old fort overlooking the harbour,
toured several markets, and watched while folks from one political
party threw a pipe bomb into the offices of the opposition party.
The newspaper next day said only two people died.
Old
Dhaka,
a few miles from new Dhaka, is a fascinating ghost town with ancient Victorian
era brick buildings, some with miniature busts of Queen
Victoria embossed on
the frieze around the ceilings. There is a disused road running
straight east and west as far as the eye can see that is said
to be the old
Silk Road used by Marco Polo.
On my last trip
out of Bangladesh, I was without a seeing-eye guide. I had the
airports pretty well memorized by now and knew where to find the
business-class lounge in Bangkok. Approaching the lounge, I saw a
flight attendant standing at the door and had a nice, albeit
one-sided, conversation with her before entering. Turned out she was
a cardboard cutout - so much for flying on my own!
To illustrate
how small the world really is, one of the Canadian consulate
staffers in Dhaka had been a student of my accountant in
Calgary. Further, my brother and sister-in-law both traveled to
Bangladesh on business, meeting with the same man, and
eventually becoming good friends. My brother was astounded when
I asked him to say hello to Iqbal for me.
Other trips
were more harrowing –
Libya
after Lockerbie;
Kuwait
a month after the fires were put out;
Jakarta during the student riots;
Viet Nam
in the monsoon. Fortunately, I was with good
friends on these trips.
Teamwork makes for good
science, and easier travelling.
The SSI project in Kuwait
was a white knuckle job in more ways than one.
Also traveling alone, the route was
through London, with a huge microfilm machine as luggage.
Security was frantic and I had to prove the machine worked and
wasn't some form of bomb. Since I had never used the device,
this was far from trivial.
On the way, we were diverted to Rhyad, Saudi Arabia, to wait out
a sand storm in Kuwait City. Except for runway lights, the
airport was pitch black -- it was after midnight. Inside half an
hour, things started to happen, lights came on, stairs and buses
arrived, and we were escorted to the transit lounge. Not long
after, we were reboarded and took off.
On approaching Kuwait City, the 747
driver tried to
do a straight-in approach in the remnants of the sand storm with a 60 mph tail wind.
The undercarriage wasn’t tall enough to touch the ground,
so we took off again, right over the Sheraton Hotel. We made headlines
the next morning when it was reported that Flight 107 nearly hit
the hotel and knocked down the chandeliers in the roof top dining
room.

Sheraton Hotel at Kuwait City
Water towers at Ahmadi
Worse yet,
the pilot made a left turn over
Iraq,
instead of a right turn over the
Persian
Gulf after the near miss with the hotel. He was in
the no-fly zone in seconds. I didn’t see the USAF escorts
but I’ll bet they were there. Finally
landed at 2:30 AM with no one there to pick me up. I found an
American with a cell phone and called the hotel. My co-workers
complained about the late hour - I wasn't due until tomorrow they
said. Well, it was tomorrow, but AM, not PM. To top it off, the hotel lobby was full of
bullet holes. The well logs were scorched and sooty from the fires.
Otherwise, it was a beautiful place.
Another SSI project took me to Viet Nam. The analysis
of the offshore fractured granite reservoir at Bach Ho (White
Tiger) in
Viet
Nam was a masterpiece of planning
and execution. Bill Clow, Michael Fung,
and Craig Lamb spent several months in Vung
Tau analyzing well logs, seismic, and
geology respectively. I was Geoscience Manager, looked after the
budget and logistics. I spent two weeks there, training the Vietnamese and
Russian clients and generally getting in the way.
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Beach north of Vung Tau
Jesus Statue Bhudda Statue
The courses
and presentations were given in English and translated first into
Russian, then from Russian into Vietnamese, a pretty slow process.
We had no idea what the Russians told the VCietnamese. Not too much technology was delivered through this heavy filter.
I have done a number of courses through both sequential and simultaneous
translation, but this was by far the most bizarre.
With daily
power failures and condensation running down inside the computers,
work was also slow, but we got it done on time and within budget,
thanks to a concerted effort by Bill Clow, Craig Lamb, and
Michael Fung. I got some credit too.

French colonial office building where the SSI team worked
(left) Beginning of total solar eclipse shot through a 3 inch floppy
disc as a filter
(right)
There was
a total eclipse of the sun while I was there – the entire
city shut down and children were kept indoors in case evil spirits
snuck out to roam free. It was a very eerie scene in an otherwise
bustling tropical city.
Teknica sent me to Tripoli,
Libya as one of the Keynote Speaker at the Libya Petroleum
Conference in 2000.
Entering
Libya
for Teknica was never easy after the
UN sanctions were imposed in response to the Lockerbie plane bombing.
There were no direct air connections to
Tripoli.
We were taken by rented mini-bus from
Tunisia by drivers who were at
peace with their Maker, so death defying acts meant nothing to
them. The route followed that taken by Rommel
and Montgomery 50 years earlier, and by T. E. Lawrence, even
earlier - you could see ghosts of the dead shifting with the
moving sand. The immigration and customs inspection at the muzzle of
AK-47’s was a bit intimidating. I was told that arriving
by ferry from
Malta was worse, but I never had
to do it.
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Tripoli Gate to
the Suk In
the Suk
Tripoli's Main Mosque
Street
demonstrations and the bustle of the Suk
demand a careful approach. And a Maple Leaf pinned to the lapel
seems to help us from being equated with the evil
US infidels.
There were
many less eventful trips, but en-garde
was the watchword:
Mexico City,
Adelaide and
Sydney again,
Bogota,
Denver,
San Francisco,
Fort McMurray,
Lloydminster ….
Several trips were made to Caracas for Rakhit
in joint ventures with CMG, but we
only saw the downtown core in daylight. On others, we never saw daylight – we
landed at night, went to the office before sunup, went back to
the hotel after sunset, and left at night. Some people think traveling
is glamourous and exciting.
Business travel
is not terribly relaxing, especially when security procedures get
slower and more idiotic every year. I have spent a lot of very
boring hours in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Narita, Heathrow,
Frankfurt, even Miami, Houston and Denver, waiting on weather, dead
airplanes, or bad connections. It
is rare to have enough guaranteed free time to be a tourist.

Modern Caracas
Merida Cable Tram
Trans-Andean Highway
Although
most trips are in-and-out without sightseeing,
I did get to Merida and then to the highest point on the Trans-Andean
Highway (4100+ meters) on a weekend stop-over
between Caracas and
Maracaibo. This was orchestrated by
the lead engineer for a Schlumberger-Intera project.
Sadly, Venezuela is not the business destination it once was.
Why society can allow one stupid man to destroy the lives and
livlihood of 80 million of his fellow citizens baffles me.
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Switzerland knows how to buid bridges
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In the fall of 1995, we took another nice vacation
– three weeks in
Germany,
Austria,
and
Switzerland,
chasing narrow gauge trains and steaming across the lakes. We
saw the Matterhorn and the
Rhine
Falls, the glaciers and
tunnels of the Alps, even an hour for spaghetti
carbonara
in
Tirano,
Italy
after riding the Bernina Express. Then
came the big surprise.
Also in 1995, President Clinton's universal medicare bill was
defeated, O. J. Simpson was acquitted, and a government building in
Oklahoma City was bombed by home-grown terrorists, killing 189
people. So much for "truth and justice for all".
 Advert for META/LOG, 1995
Y2K came and went and the world did not end.
I did get a cheque from an oil company dates 14 January 1900 but
the bank said not to worry, there were many others like it.
In 2001,
RPCL asked me to design a method for processing very large batches
of wells through a rigorous curve selection, normalization, and QC check, followed
by a simplified calculation suite.
Initially, Rakhit
provided the programming skills, hardware, and clients.
A number of regional reconnaisance jobs on the Belly
River, Mannville Group, Cretaceous shallow gas, and even coal, with 300 to 3000
wells each, were run for resource potential or reservoir properties
assessment. We called the database and QC function SUPERLOG and the processing
phase LOGFUSION. These used a commercial database with SQL
and C++ programmed by the capable hands of Jerome Goodman.
Prototyping
of each project was done with META/LOG, where parameters were optimized
to give results that match core. Independently, stratigraphy,
hydrodynamic, and production data were correlated and mapped
by other members of the project team,
then the log analysis results were generated, compared to
ground truth, and mapped. Smaller jobs were run in META/LOG
without the hassle of database programs and inflexible hard-coded
software.
These projects continued for about 3 years.
Where were you on 11 September 2001? I was
starting a seminar at Teknica in Calgary an hour after watching the
second plane smash into the Twin Towers. Totally unreal and
unbelievable! But it was real. Needless to say, we didn't
get a lot done that day, or for some time thereafter. Hindsight
shows that nearly 3000 people died, including the passengers and
crews of four airliners,
fire fighters and rescue workers, and early morning office workers in
New York and the Pentagon.
Parallel
TRACK
-- CRAIN'S PETROPHYSICAL HANDBOOK
When
I graduated as an Electrical Engineer in 1962, the word
“Petrophysics” was only 12 years old and practitioners performed log
analysis calculations in the logging truck or in the office, using
pencil and paper, charts, and slide rules. We needed only two
equations – Wyllie’s time average for porosity and Archie’s for
water saturation. Pretty simple, or so it seemed then.
But as time-and-a-half moved along, the equations reproduced faster
than rabbits in Australia. Multiple versions of shale corrected
porosity and water saturation, complex lithology models,
permeability and productivity estimates, elastic properties of rocks
– all this before we had easy access to calculators or computers.
Who could remember all this stuff? Not me!
So I started keeping notes. These progressed to course notes and
much later into a textbook and a number of software packages. For
the book, I used “computer-ready math” instead of the “classic”
presentation used in scientific textbooks. The publisher was
reluctant, but finally agreed. That was 1986. It was easy to see
that a second edition would need two volumes to cover more topics.
This didn’t seem to me to be economically practical for a typical
petrophysicist.
This
fact led me, starting in 1999, to develop a shareware website
version of the textbook that could be updated daily if needed and
could grow endlessly. From 2010 to 2020, the site averaged 30,000
unique visitors from 140 countries every month. In contrast, only
2000 copies of the original textbook were ever printed.
One purist asked why the equations were not in “textbook” format. In
this era of ubiquitous PCs, calculators, and smart phones, the
answer was a resounding “Duh?”
User diversity proliferated too. Originally we dealt mostly with a
geologist. Now six engineering specialties, three or four species of
geologists, and any number of wild-eyed geophysicists use our
results. Lesser known disciplines also get involved: economists,
lawyers, judges, government regulators, stock market analysts,
bankers, even dentists and ranchers trying to find a good
investment.
Since the textbook in 1986, a much expanded set of ”notes” was
available, including reservoir engineering, core analysis, dipmeters,
use of logs in structural and stratigraphic analysis, and seismic
petrophysics. Today, of course, unconventional reservoirs are the
“play du jour”, so more research, more notes on the special cases
for special situations were developed.
In 2022, the Handbook was expanded to include production
logging, completion and workover operations, and Petrophysics in
the Green Ecomomy.
The shareware concept had to be abandoned as it no longer covered
hosting costs. In 2020, CPH became a Members Only site with limited
access for Guests to evaluate the content. Lifetime and Student
memberships were added.
This website is most;y my own work, flaws and all. I researched,
typed, edited the text, and scanned everything you see – 400+
webpages, 3000+ printed pages if you were foolish enough to print
it. On average, it takes 40 - 80 hours to build a new page – keeping
“notes” is hard work but really worth it. Check it out at
www.spec2000.net.
But of course, many others have contributed: every author whose
work has been paraphrased, every client who contributed ideas and
background about their projects, all the service company reps who
contributed examples and technical literature, the 3000+ students
who tested my skills and their’s in my courses, and many more in all
walks of life who made my life easier, Special thanks to James
Everett who built the automated training products delivery system
and the CPH Mwmbershio systen, Sonja McEwing and Kirsten McEwing for
proofreading, and Dorian Holgate who prepared recent log analysis
depth plots. Sandra Bleue has done the research and updated numerous
tool profile pages.
Updated
versions of all my Reference Manuals, and Integrated
Petrophysics narrated PowerPoint Slide Shows were made available for download,
for a modest fee of course. In 2020, the slide shows were updated to
widescreen format and converted to videos, delivered with course
notes and reference manuals..
In 2016, PetroLessons in Houston
began offering my courses for people who
prefer online self study. This joint venture is bringing Integrated
Petrophysics to a wide audience in the USA.
Flying On My Own
- Spectrum 2000 Mindware
- PART 2
From 2001 to mid 2016, when I retired from
consulting and course presentations, activity was brisk,
still travelling every month or so and working long hours. The
financial meltdown of 2007 - 2008 slowed the work a bit but not enough to
really relax. The nature of petrophysical consulting jobs was
slowly evolving. Fewer were from consulting firms; more came
directly from oil companies. In fact almost all the consulting firms
I had worked for were gone, except RPCL and CMG. Jobs had become more complex, with
larger data sets and a larger variety of lab data to organize and
correlate.
With the new emphasis on unconventional reservoirs in Canada and
overseas, I was swamped.
In 2011, I decided that I needed an assistant, so I asked Dorian
Holgate to fill the slot. He had been a student in one of my courses
for BJ Services and later we had worked indepoendently on the same
joint venture project between BJ and Rakhit, so I knew his work
ethic and skill level.
Montney well in Alberta showing core and XRD data used to calibrate the petrophysical analysis
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Over the years, I had
developed innovative techniques for handling the kerogen
corrections needed in organic-rich unconventional gas shale and oil
shale prospects. Dorian coded them into Geographix PRIZM, and
later into PowerLog. We also added the
calculation of the mechanical properties of rocks, based on
reconstructed logs, to the well-tested log analysis
script that had evolved from the LOG/MATE and META/LOG programs.
Tar sands, Bakken oil siltstones, and Montney silt/shale gas jobs flowed in as fast as we could do
the work. Similar plays in France, England, USA, South America, and
Australia augmented the local work. They have all blurred together in my mind and none stands out
like some of the older projects that involved interesting characters
or travel to warm climates.
Our
quality control of the input data and
the accuraccy of our results when compared to
ground truth won some very faithful clients. Our technicaal skill in
integrated petrophysics led to more successful
reservoir descriptions and stimulation designs, and thus higher production rates,
and more money in the bank for the clients.
In the
few quiet times, I managed to squeeze
in some vacations -
finally. All involved train travel or tourist trains.
Colorado narrow gauge, Switzerland's mountain railways, California
-- Nevada circle, the Canadian to Toronto, then on to Montreal,
and the Rocky Mountaineer through the Canadian Rockies were very
relaxing. A trip with the family to Homg Kong for 10 days around
New Year celebrations was more hectic but great for bringing
back memories of my trip to Beijing in 1974.
Course presentations were still going
strong. They took me to Bogota, Tulsa, London, Houston, Oklahoma City, and of
course Calgary.
The
Canadian Foreign Affairs website says "Don't Go!" but I went anyway,
with Denis Briere as Assistant Instructor and seeing-eye person. The
folks in Bogota were generous and showed us the city and its
excellent restaurants. At our first cafe, the ringing melody of
Murray McLaughlin's "Snow Bird" was blasting from the loudspeakers,
with a tiny hint of a Spanish accent. The course flowed smoothly
with the help of two excellent simultaneous translators, both from
Ottawa, and Denis's
command of technical Spanish.
The class at work in Bogota
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I was invited by
University of Tulsa in 2004 to teach petrophysics as part of the TU
LEADER program they run for Schlumberger engineers. Ten trips a
year through George Bush's Homeland Security personnel at Calgary
and Tulsa makes the real Purgatory seem pretty tame. Merely asking a
civil question is enough to get you banned from a flight at United
Airlines, which may be an oversensitive reaction to their problems
on 9/11.
The TU Continuing Education team were a great bunch of
people to work with.
Thank you
Stacy, Ruth, and Nanci.
The students were the cream of Schlumberger's
young engineers from all parts of the world. The conviviality of
such a mix of languages, faiths, and political influences is a model
the rest of world could strive for. Working with them has
been truly rewarding.
Unfortunately the program ended in 2009 as the
recession trimmed training and expansion budgets.
In 2005, Dr. Rob Stewart at University of Calgary
invited me to assist in curriculum
design and presentation for a new Petrophysics course for 3rd
year geology and geophysics students. About 90 students a year
went through my labs and lectures. Young and naive about the reality
of the oil industry, I hope this exposure reinforced the need
for integrated petrophysics in their future careers. My involvement
ended at the end of the 2008 semester when Rob moved to Houston.
The courses in OKC and Houston convinced me that the majority of
geologists and reservoir engineers, and their managers, are
still woefully unaware of the value of quality petrophysics to their
bottom line. Hopefully, as more of the 3000+ students who took
one of my courses move up the ladder, this will change for the
better. The oil industry generates massive amounts of data, much
of which is promptly buried in disparate paper and digital file
systems, never to be seen or shared again.
What a waste! Amazon, Walmart, and Google have shown us how to
monetize "Big Data". We must learn to do the same. Maybe we need
a Chief Data Officer (CDO) as well as the CEO, COO, and CFO, to
make sure the data collected is actually used for the benefit of
the sharehoders and society in general. To do this effectively,
put ALL your data to work and learn to SHARE data you don't yet
have but probably could use.
Even if every car and light truck turns electric overnight, we
still need oil and gas for all those airplanes, plastics,
furnaces, air conditioners, and personal items that we cherish.
The "Age of Oil" is not dead yet!
In
March 2019, I was honoured with the first ever CWLS "Lifetime Achievement Award".
Among other things, the presentation
mentioned my "willingness to openly share and educate",
acknowledging my 38 years of course presentations and the 20th
anniversary of my petrophysical training website.
The award itself is a beautiful tactile
sculpture with the Rocky Mountains in the background and the
Foothills in the foreground, the CWLS logo, a gamma ray log from
a tar sand well, and a nice inscription. "Thank You" to the CWLS Executive for honouring
me and to all those who helped me make it through the years.
!! It's time to retire. The ranch has been exchanged for a
condo. Improving the Handbook keeos my brain active; walking the
hills of Happy Valley keeps my body Happy!
SIDE
TRACK -- Going Home, Briefly
I
had not been back to Montreal since Expo 67. In 2012, I
took the Via Rail "Canadian" from Edmonton to Toronto, continued on
to Ottawa, then drove with my brother and his wife to Montreal to
see our old homes, schools, and other haunts. Amazingly, they were much as
I remembered, with little change or decline. Old Montreal has been
beautifully restored, a far-cry from the grubby, hectic harbour front of my youth. Faster highways, the Metro, and lack of English
signs are the only outward signs of progress, but the downtown traffic and pedestrians are still
frantic. Commuter trains are streamlined diesels instead of
steamers, but when it rains you can still smell the coal dust in the
ballast.
Previous commitments meant I could not attend
the McGill Engineering "Class of 62" 50th anniversary reunion
in October, but
Bob Smythe, an old school chum, escorted me around McGill,
commenting knowledgably on all the changes and additions. The lower
campus still feels like the refuge it has always been. New and
renovated buildings push outward on the perimeter. Activists are
still active, freshmen looking lost still troop the pathways.
Afterward, we checked out Westmount and Mont Royal lookouts to
compare the skyline with old postcard views from the 1950's. Later
that day, we relived the family outing to Chalet BBQ on Sherbrooke
St West -- menu, flavour, location, and staff (or their clones)
unchanged since 1944. "Plus
ça change,
plus
c'est la
même
chose".
The
best memory brought back in force was the ride on the "Gold Car", an
open-air sightseeing streetcar at ExpoRail (Canada's Railway Museum)
that used to run in summer in Montreal. This was our favourite
outing when we were kids in the 1940's and 50's. The ride, and the
tour of the Museum, was escorted by Steve Cheasley, the museum
President, who generously provided a personalized commentary on the
background and significance of each exhibit. It was a wonderful
re-visit to the railways of my youth, all the way back to my
grandparents early days, with some of the best restorations in the
world on display.
A few maples were just
beginning to redden, the weather was clear and mild, and the train
trips across half the continent were very restful.
I thought I would feel more nostalgic, even sad, to see these
memories brought to life again, but it was - thankfully - really
pleasant. They say "you can't go home again", but
this trip was pretty close. Like the airline pilots say before
landing in New Zealand, "Set your watches back 40 years"
-- Montreal
is in that time zone too.
But my "Home" is really in Alberta. I caught the bug in 1955 on a
vacation with my parents, moved West in 1962 and left it only long
enough to see the rest of the world, then to return to comfort and
safety. On a broader note, this Planet Is My Home too. Please
look after it.
FOND
MemorieS - The
art on my walls
Very Personal Choices From 5 Continents
"I don't know much about art, but I
know what I like" applies to a lot of us, and I am no exception. I
like variety and colour contrasts. Nothing here is valuable, famous,
or even worth preserving, but they have brought me pleasure and fond
memories of places, people, and things that appealed to me.
I can no longer see the art on my
walls, so it's really there as a conversation starter for visitors.
I can sometimes see the images on this page because they are small
enough and bright enough to be assembled in my mind. I hope you
enjoy some of them.
RAILROAD
ART
I have been a keen
observer and fan of railways, and transportation in general, since I
was 5 years old. Trains, planes, ships, automobile, and now space
craft form the fabric of modern economic activity. Nothing has
transformed world history more nor left such a huge footprint on the
planet. Younger people take transportation for granted and cite
social media as the "world changer" but it was transportation that
made room for a society with enough spare time to allow for the
Internet, Google, and Facebook to exist.
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"Jull Snow Excavator",
Gicleè prints of
water colour by
Jan Rons.
View near Hancock Colorado in April 1890 on the
Denver, South Park and Pacific Railway (DSP&P)
mainline to Alpine Tunnel ,with four pusher locomotives, This
print, and its twin shown below, take pride of place in my
collection.
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Mr. Orange Jull, inventor
of the centrifugal snow excavator, stands at the railing on the
roof of the plow to observe operations,
Gicleè prints
of
water colour by
Jan Rons.
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Here is the W.
H. Jackson photo from April 1890 that is the model for Jan Rons'
watercolour shown above.
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"Uphill Pull", framed print
by Ted Blaylock. Listen to that roar as it passes by!
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A wonderful piece of wall-art produced in the 1970's. It
consists of a brass-coloured plaque with DSP&P Cooke Mogul #111
(#69 before 1885) and a beautiful arch-windowed coach,
possibly DSP&P #57, 58, or 59 (#7, 9, 10 before 1885). This is
mounted on a mahogany base, along with a complete weather station
consisting of French-made thermometer, barometer, and humidity
meter..
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This
CAD drawing is by
William
Gould shows DSP&P 2-6-6T Mason Bogie
#6 "Tenmile" before the change
to "plain-jane" black in 1885. I have 1:20, 1:24, 1:48, amd 1:87
scale models
of this locomotive in my collection.
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More of
Bill
Gould's
giclee prints of the famous Denver, South
Park and Pacific Mason Bogie Locomotives
These memories of my favourite locomotive hang in my office, and
trigger thoughts of my years in model railroading, which
concentrated on the South Park from the 1990's to the present.
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"DSP&P 2-6-0 Mogul
#18 on Freemont Pass", by Tucker Smith.
The locomotive colours
(red boiler and cow catcher and green cab) are the same as the LGB 1:22
scale model of Denver South Park and Pacific #18
(LGB model #2018D)
-- another memorial to my Garden
Railway.
MEMORY
JOGGERS FOR MY TRAVELS
Some art is more personal and evokes fond memories of places past
and present - like my ranch, travels, or significant events in my
life.
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"Landwasser Viaduct"
"Autumn Colours"
(Narrow Gauge Steam
-- Blonay-Chamby Baye de Clarens Viaduct )
Memories of Switzerland
1995 and
2009. Prints from Gerald
Savine
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"Paddle Steamer Italie at Montreaux, Lac Leman".
Memories of Switzerland -- print from Gerald
Savine
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"New Beginnings" and
"Small Wonder" -- Hereford calf prints by Ailene Halvorson.
Memories of cold nights and wonderful mornings at
Rocking Are Herefords.
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"The Beef Starts Here", print #336 of 400 by Darcy Shaver -- the frame
itself is a work of art.
The view on the right is a close approximatio to my "Ultimate Cabin
in the Woods" that I built in the bush in Central Alberta. It didn't
take long to turn it into a working purebred Hereford ranch,
Rocking Are Herefords.
"Running Horses" -- Chinese Scroll on silk
Memories of a 1974 business trip, before China was "discovered" by
the West.
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"1948 MG-TC", silk screen, limited edition #5 of 7 by Ian Stewart
-- my favourite car.
At various times I owned four different MG cars, an MG-TC in
Australia, two different MG-TD's in Canada, and an MGB-GT that made
the trip from Calgary to Montreal in 48 hours to see Expo '67,
(celebrating Canada's 100th birthday).
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"Sydney Opera House", oil on canvas by Bai Yi -- those were
the days!
I was just turning 29 and assigned to be Resident Manager of a
seismic data pocessing center in Sydney,
with a staff of 45 and a budget of $1 million a year. The sharks
weren't all in the water!
SOUVENIRS
OF DAYS PAST
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"Lifetime Achievement Award" from Canadian Well Logging Society
March 2019
Rocky Mountains and Foothils tactile sculpture, with Gamma Ray well
log curve
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"Horned Hereford Bull" and
"Cow
with Calf", Beswick figurines
Commorating 40 years of ranch life raising Purebred Herefords.
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"China National Railway 150th Anniversary" -- in mempry of my 1974
trip from Hong Kong through Canton to Shanghai by steam train en
route to Beijing.
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"Great Pyrenees Mountain Dog", Sandcast Figurine
In memory of six Great Pyrenees,
along with six other lovely mutts, four Red-Point Siamese cats, and
other assorted critters that preserved my sanity over the
years.
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"Siberian Tiger" (rug as a wall hanging), 30 x 52 inches. Handmade
by ladies of Dhaka Women's Cooperative.
Momento of five trips to Bangladesh for SSI on behalf of CIDA in the
early 1990s.
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"Camel and Pyramids" wall hangings, Acrylic on burlap, 33 x 48
jnches.
Mpmento of some hair-raising trips to Libya and Kuwait for SSI in
the 1990's.
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Copyright ©
2022
E. R. (Ross) Crain, P.Eng.
email
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