DAVID GRAY |

ASSOCIATE EDITOR, CSEG RECORDER, FDAVID.GRAY@GMAIL.COM |

After two fun years working with a great group of people, I’m leaving my role as Associate Editor of the CSEG Recorder. This will not be the last you hear from me though, as after working here, I am inspired to publish even more in this great magazine that we are very lucky to have.

A couple of years ago, after leaving Ikon thanks to Covid and recovering from working for 35 years, I knew that I needed to continue to be involved in geophysics. Working for the Recorder scratched that itch very nicely. I want to thank the Recorder editors for taking on me and my daughter Ashley. Between the two of us, I hope we made a decent associate editor by combining my technical expertise and Ashley’s knowledge of technical writing, English, and publishing.

I’m leaving because I have been blessed with an interesting new job with Geomodeling. One of the reasons I am with Geomodeling now is that they have tools that will allow me to pursue my goals more easily, especially with the capability to do AI around horizontal wells. You will be seeing me at lots of conferences again. That geophysics itch is being scratched in a new way. I won’t hesitate to come back to the Recorder again. It has been a good ride. One of the best bits is I have gotten to know better the dedicated volunteers who make sure that the material you read is so good; Ruth Peach, Beth Atkinson, Brian Schulte, Draga Talinga, Steve Jensen, Janis Rose, and Misha Mustaqeem.

I highly recommend considering working with this team if you need that geophysics itch scratched. There are a lot of ways to do it.

For me, I will be publishing and presenting a lot more material. We have a few papers for different conferences this year, and I intend to finish some technical articles I started a long time ago. I think publishing these articles is another way of volunteering for me. I want to publish my style of technical articles, ones that address the value of geosciences and the practical use of the tools we already have. The Recorder is a great venue for those kinds of articles because it values both technical content and practical implementations.

The Recorder can publish articles like Shuki Ronen’s “An Environmentally Friendly Low-Frequency Seismic Source”, which tells the story of how the source came about in addition to its technical aspects. I took a page from Satinder and did a few interviews, but in a different style. These were a really effective way to get to know some very interesting geophysicists better, but also to help us get a story out to you that might not have been told otherwise. I got to interview some great geophysicists who I really respect. Check out the Recorder’s Interviews for interviews with these and more great geophysicists.

I will be giving the CSEG luncheon talk in February on how I’ve used artificial intelligence (AI) tools to do a variety of things. I’ll talk about some key examples of how AI might be used to do things you might not think of right off hand. Like reducing the workload for our petrophysicist by figuring out which one or two dozen of the 600+ wells in an oilsands field needed to have the elastic curves edited, and which wells those were and what the problems were. Like showing that our interpreters were looking at the best seismic volume to optimally illuminate hydrocarbons – no inversions were needed. For managers, how about if you could predict production? I also plan to publish a tutorial on the relationship between AVO and petrophysics. We will also be presenting on using AI to learn from you and extend your interpretation and for predicting microseismic event densities from seismic attributes, which leads to SRV prediction.

I have a lot to learn, and I look forward to seeing and learning from you all at various conferences and meetings over the year. As always, I will be at GeoConvention and other CSEG events, and hopefully at IMAGE, URTeC, and EAGE this year. It will be good to see you around downtown again and through the Recorder.

So, in closing, rather than saying farewell, I say, “See you soon.” I’m looking forward to doing so.

Cheers, David