Welcome to our Q&A session with a member of our Onward team, Nate.  

Can you give us a little introduction and a brief background? 

I am Nate Suurmeyer, an exploration geoscientist, specifically in the digitalization team. For around 13 years, I’ve worked on a variety of projects from heavy oil to deepwater new ventures to the Gulf of Mexico and a little bit of unconventional on the side. So I’ve had a lot of different experiences in the exploration space. But over the last couple years, I have been really interested in data science and how it can be used to transform geoscience. So I’ve gotten more into coding and that’s what led me to new tools and techniques which then led me to Onward.  

Could you shed a little bit of light on what it’s like to be a geoscientist? What are the biggest hurdles that you found in your career and how do you think Onward can change them? 

Working for the oil and gas industry as a geologist is phenomenal. You have just so much to work with so much cool data and you get to see things that very few people have seen. But it’s a double-edged sword. Because with that volume also comes complexity with how you access it, how you control it, and how you interpret it. The tools that you have are very specific, they’re too clunky or they’re too old. And so you just can’t get the answer for the problem that you’re trying to solve. It just takes so long to interact with the data that you end up just trying to find shortcuts. Sometimes that means putting biases on the data that will end up putting a weight on the interpretation of that data later on. 

What I’m really excited about with Onward is that we’re starting to experiment with ways, whether it’s through better applications or through different ways of breaking down bias, to have more people working on more problems or things like the Onward Accelerator, where we’re seeing things that are really out there in terms of what could be the future of what we could do with geoscience data. 

From your perspective, why is Onward important right now? 

We’re going to need hydrocarbons in our lives for several decades to come just based on the status of how we use our energy. So we do need to be out there trying to find more hydrocarbons and do it more efficiently. If we can do that with fewer wells and fewer resources, the better. Right now, we are still very much stuck in a way of thinking that is a holdover from the early 90’s. We haven’t really evolved that much at least in geosciences. 

We need to be thinking about how we can optimize, how we can cut up things, how we can be more efficient or how we can give more options, more diversity of thoughts; ultimately, we need to bring new tools and different people into the system and use completely new workflows. 

I would love to hear a little bit more about your perspective on data science and its effect on oil and gas. How does it provide value? 

Geosciences before the 80’s were all done on paper and then computers started coming out. Actually, all geoscientists were hackers back then. Everyone was writing their own pieces of code, their own sort of analyses to process their data and everything. 

As the 90;s came in, and up until recently, we’ve migrated as an industry into using big monolithic platforms that do all the whiz bang stuff for us. But the problem is that when we use these big tools, we are limiting the way we can think about problems, because it is a set workflow. Your data must be in this format, you can only do this and that to it. When in reality, there might be a lot more options out there, a lot more creativity for how you can think about processing your data. 

What I really like about data science is that it gives geoscientists tools to work with so that they can better tinker with their data, they can tinker with their workflows. 

With Onward Challenges, we’ve seen data scientists jump in and win the prizes. That’s really important because having this outside look at our data and our problems shows us potentially better ways or faster ways to go about tackling situations. The Onward platform really allows that. We can get some of the best outside talent in there to give us insights. 

What aspect of Onward excites you the most? What gets you up in the morning to work with the team? 

I’m a huge fan of challenges, because this is personally where my interest lies right now. I also see a lot of value in our projects. I’ve been around enough. I understand our processes, how we feel about particular basins. It’s fun to see different people’s backgrounds and how that blends into how people do their interpretation, how they view the world. The geoscience world that is. 

If a genie granted you three wishes, what would they be in this context for Onward? Or another way to think of it, what would be the most desirable or the maximum desirable product for Onward? 

What I’d really like to see happen is around challenges and where we’re moving now with microservices. It’s where we’re actually taking a piece of code that somebody’s written, maybe a a deep learning algorithm or a widget, and that then becomes something that any geoscientist can just pull down and use. The person who wrote it gets a bit of money for writing the code because you have to pay per use but then the customer gets to use this really cool tool to go do a specific workflow. 

When this happens, then I imagine coding and technology will really start spreading very quickly in the geosciences because people will now have all these different tools that they can use to do their workflows differently and better. And this also will encourage you to write and do more yourself in terms of building the right tool that you want to see out there. 

Let’s switch gears and talk a little bit about you. What has it been like for you to work with the Onward team? 

I think it’s great to see the Onward team put things together. There’s been quite a bit of problems with learning about geoscience data. The Onward team has been very flexible and always looking for solutions and always trying to find the easiest way to match the job that needs to be done. So I really appreciate their flexibility. Also, I appreciate that their backgrounds are also coming to show. If it were a bunch of geoscientists building this platform, we would probably end up with some of the same problems and sluggishness that we’ve had before. 

What’s a fun fact about you. What’s one thing you want to leave with everyone about Nate? 

Fun fact about Nate. Well, I was rightly reprimanded by a Moroccan shepherd at one time for trespassing. And you know I shouldn’t have done it. But there were just these amazing rock features in this stone that I couldn’t resist inspecting and so I walked onto their property.