It is always appreciated when readers of the Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week take the time to follow-up on our articles with additional insights. This week we will start recognizing some of these contributions.
We kicked off our series on the throughline of resource plays in the history of the western Canadian hydrocarbon industry with a post on the first gas well in western Canada. Robert Hawkes of Pressure Diagnostics Ltd sent a scan of a pix Card for the Alderson well.
Courtesy of R. Hawkes.
And this sent me on a trip down memory lane.
A number of readers might be asking: “What is a pix card?”. I Googled the term and nothing related to the oil and gas industry came up.” This conundrum is where a Boomer can be of assistance.
Before data was available through your Petro Ninja phone app, before it was accessible on your desktop, you had to get well information from 3” by 5” pieces of thin cardboard. Board tops, drillstem test summaries, core intervals, AOF summaries and more were all crammed in there. You would flip, well by well, through a tray of cards to figure out your play. You would correlate tops and measure reservoir attributes by printing well log segments one at a time and then splicing them together. It took hours. Lots of tape was used and thumbs were cut over the years (at least until you became proficient at ripping the edge with a metal ruler).
Copyright popscreen.com
I remember showing a very talented geologist who began her career in the digital age how to use a fiche printer and her telling me in no uncertain terms that she would move on to a different profession if that was still part of the workflow. I agree with her. Nostalgia aside, I would not go back to these tools notwithstanding their being a step up from the log library (another service from by-gone days). Digital data has made us more efficient (with an unfortunate concomitant reduction in the need for geologists). The continued development of resource plays has proceeded hand-in-hand with the expansion of digital technology.
Reference
https://www.popscreen.com/prod/MTU1NDY5NzM2/CANON-MICROPRINTER-90-MICROFICHE-MICROFILM-READER-PRINTER