Birger Hansen

"The oil industry started using specialised logging tools to identify geological structures in the 1970's, but it took much longer to introduce a suitable interpretation methodology. The theories of statistical symmetry of rocks and spherical statistics have been available most of the 20th century, but as geologists did not use computers then, the methods were not applied. With our current software, we can routinely make full 3D analysis of image picked planes to estimate paleostress, fault trends and paleotransport. For rock stress and mechanical properties we have a similar story: Kirsch defined the theory of stress around a borehole over 100 years ago, but it wasn't till 1990's that we had the software tools to easily pick far field stress from fractures on borehole images. Having the data and the methodology, many image logs are unfortunately still archived without a geoscience based interpretation, probably because the job is too time consuming. That is why the industry needs specialists who have a rational methodology for extracting relevant information from the raw gigabytes."
- Birger Hansen