CSEG interviews Olivier Dubrule

Abstract

Olivier Dubrule graduated as a civil engineer in 1978 from Ecole des Mines de Paris. At that time, the institution's “Centre de Géostatistique” was developing new methods and applications for the petroleum industry and Dubrule was offered the opportunity to work on a PhD with Professor G. Matheron, the father of geostatistics, as his thesis director. Having obtained his PhD in 1981, he was offered a job by Sohio in the United States, where for the next four years he worked on reservoir modeling for the Prudhoe Bay Field. Geostatistics was used mostly through kriging, for mapping petrophysical properties across the field. Next he went to work for Shell International in the Hague. In the mid-1980s geostatistical reservoir characterization was taking off. Object-based models and indicator simulation were subjects of great discussion, but most companies at the time were developing their own software. In 1991 Dubrule moved to Elf to head a reservoir characterization project. One of the results of the project was the first geostatistical inversion software, developed in cooperation with Stanford University. In 1994 Dubrule started a new geologic research group at the Elf Geoscience Research in London, where his team developed geostatistical techniques related to seismic data interpretation, with new tools for structural uncertainty quantification and geostatistical inversion of both seismic and production data. After the merger with Total, Dubrule became head of the Earth Modeling and Uncertainties Group, where they had gathered all the expertise related to uncertainty quantification, earth modeling, and geostatistics. Since 2001 Dubrule has been manager of Geoscience Training and Technical Image at Total. One of his areas of interest is technology transfer; the SEG Distinguished Instructor Short Course, “Geostatistics for Seismic Data Integration in Earth Models,” he taught in 28 cities in 20 countries, is part of this activity.