December 2024
In data-poor settings, analogs can provide context and insight to inform interpretations, ensure geological plausibility, and help understand risk. But what defines an ‘appropriate’ analog? The selection process is often highly subjective, with bias playing a larger role than we might admit. Without a systematic approach, we tend to choose familiar analogs and concepts, potentially overlooking more appropriate and fruitful ideas.
This edition of Subsurface Insights presents an analog selection approach that prioritizes geological understanding over superficial similarities or preconceived notions. By extracting geological parameters from the Neftex® solution, we demonstrate how to characterize depositional packages using a geological “fingerprint”. This fingerprint can then relate packages and identify similar settings.
We test this approach on the Orange Basin and suggest several analogous packages from other locations, some expected and others less obvious. Finally, we show how valuable information associated with the analogs, such as relevant play elements, fields, or well logs, can be retrieved from the Neftex solution.
Although we are in the early stages of developing this vision, it shows great promise for identifying analogs in an unbiased way and efficiently finding relevant data from large information sets. We hope this will help geoscientists remove bias from their selection and discover more appropriate and useful analogs.
