dGB Earth Sciences’ OpendTect and OSR to benefit students worldwide

dGB Earth Sciences has revealed that in 2012 more than 2600 students from over 300 universities worldwide benefitted from dGB’s academic licensing policy.

Under the academic license agreement, Universities get free access to the OpendTect seismic interpretation software and commercial plugins such as ARK CLS, Earthworks and Sitfal. Since universities often struggle to get access to data, dGB also started the Open Seismic Repository (OSR), a database of seismic datasets with interpretations that can be used freely under the Creative Commons License Agreement. The free software and free datasets are helping to improve teaching and research at universities.

Tennessee Tech University (TTU) and its Earth Sciences Department is one of the universities that benefits from this scheme.

Rather than using traditional 2D line exercises, undergraduates taking the ‘Sedimentation and Stratigraphy’ module at TTU are using OpendTect to interpret the seismic data. This is achieved through OpendTect’s SSIS (Sequence Stratigraphic Interpretation System) plugin, which increases insight into the depositional history of sedimentary packages and helps find stratigraphic traps; and HorizonCube, a plugin that auto tracks a dense set of mapped 3D stratigraphic surfaces and increases the number and density of mapped horizons.

Once comfortable with navigating the 3D seismic cube, TTU students characterise reflector geometries using the HorizonCube tool and are then able to pick sequence boundaries and flooding surfaces in a North Sea dataset using the OpendTect SSIS plugin.

Free under the GNU GPL license, and with a wide variety of commercial plugins, OpendTect is the only available open source seismic interpretation platform used in the oil and gas industry today and has been downloaded over 100 000 times. Academic licenses of OpendTect have been adopted in universities in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Asia Pacific and the Americas.

Adapted from a press release by David Bizley

Read the article online at: https://www.oilfieldtechnology.com/exploration/23012013/dgb_earth_sciences_opendtect_and_osr_to_benefit_students_worldwide/