“No data, no problems,” laughs Tanguy Lomme from Epslog when he reminisces on his years at Shell when he worked as a reservoir engineer. As soon as he joined founder and CEO Christophe Germay to become part of the Epslog team in 2013, his perspective on that mantra changed quite dramatically.
All of a sudden, Tanguy turned into an advocate of bringing high quality core data into the reservoir modelling workflow. But it wasn’t too difficult for him: “I knew very well what company I had joined,” he says.
Tanguy and Christophe had known each other for quite a few years already, going back to the mid 1990’s when they both spent some time at the University of Minnesota, under the wings of Professor Emmanuel Detournay.
And with Emmanuel the story of how Epslog evolved starts, as his work stands at the very basis of what the guys from Liège in Belgium are doing now with their Core DNA product: Offering a wide range of continuous core analyses through scratching and scanning the rocks. But at the time, in the 1990’s, it wasn’t a core analysis device that Emmanuel had in mind. For him, it had a totally different purpose.
Better understanding bits
What can be called the first core scratch test device was not a machine that was developed to test core: It was a device that was to test a single cutter of a PDC drill bit using a material that was as close to a formation as possible. Core seemed a logical candidate for that.
“What Emmanuel did is to use the outcomes of the tests to see how he could better understand PDC drill bits to ultimately overcome unwanted behaviour such as stick-slip vibrations and bit bouncing,” Christophe says. “We all came from an engineering background, and it was the tools rather than the geology that interested us.” Christophe studied engineering in physics specialized in space technics.
But as the scratch test device was further developed at the University of Minnesota, Emmanuel realized that the data they produced were also of use to geomechanical specialists, as one of the outputs was the uni-axial compressive strength. This resulted in him receiving sponsorship money, and some companies acquired a machine too.
“The advantage of the scratch test is that it is much less destructive than crushing a core plug, which is another way to determine the uni-axial compressive strength,” explains Christophe, “and it measured the parameter across the entire length of the core rather than at a single point.”
“Next time it’s white powder”
The first step in the students’ business venture was to get a scratch test device from the US to Europe. “Emmanuel sent us to the Netherlands to deliver, install, and train people to use the first machine in Shell,” recounts Tanguy. It was the very same machine that he himself had been using for his master’s research project.
It became trip to remember.
“Me and a fellow student, Thomas Richard (another founder of Epslog), arrived at customs in Amsterdam with the machine in our hand luggage, and were ready to walk through the “Nothing to Declare” lane, until we got asked to undergo an inspection,” says Tanguy. “Now you’re travelling with this,” the customs agent said, “but next time it will be with white powder.”
“It got us into a bit of trouble and in the end someone from Shell had to come over to Schiphol and make a payment in cash,” Tanguy laughs. “It beautifully illustrates how oblivious we were about the world beyond our lab and of very basic things such as customs.”
And whilst Tanguy and Thomas were waiting in the customs clearing room, Thomas was still finishing the coding of the software that came with the device. “It was a surreal experience to have our first contact with the industry this way. But despite the trouble that the first shipment brought, it was the start of a collaboration that lasts until today. There was the tension of us not really fitting in, but yet delivering to satisfaction,” concludes Tanguy.
The product was subsequently patented, but a US-based company acquired the rights and started marketing the service without further involving the university. At that point, it might just as well have been the end of the game for the young French and Belgian guys working with Emmanuel in the USA.
But it wasn’t.
Down under
It was in Australia in the early 2000’s, when Christophe was carrying out his PhD on drill bit mechanics with Emmanuel Detournay, who was part time conducting research in CSIRO, that he overheard a conversation between Thomas and Emmanuel saying that they were keen to establish a new company based on the scratch test principle. This time it would be for the market outside the US, where a patent prevented them from competing.
It became Epslog. “The only ones we could convince investing in us were some former students from the University of Minnesota,” says Christophe, “but it brought us € 90 k, enough to get going and pay for the development of the first equipment.”
But just after all the paperwork was signed in November 2005, Thomas decided to pursue a career at CSIRO in Australia and leave the industry. It left Christophe, who was still working on his PhD, on his own in Liège.
After six months of developing everything from software to hardware, the company won its first contract with an Australian operator, even though the machine was not fully functional yet. But what do you do? Turn it down? Of course you don’t. The result was working overnight again, helped by Thomas who spent the last nights and days coding the software.
There is no one patting you on the back to say “keep going”
“This is a good moment to emphasize how important industry champions are,” say both Christophe and Tanguy. People who understand that things go wrong sometimes, but who don’t turn their back on you straight away.
“Dirk Mooren from RWE, Fons Marcelis from Shell, Edmond Poyol from TotalEnergies and Lutz Rieppe from PETRONAS were instrumental in that sense,” says Christophe. “It really helped us build our portfolio after the initial contract in Australia. The industry as a whole was difficult to convince, but it is individuals who become early adopters that can make the difference for a small company.”
But it remained challenging to win a lot more business, with the 2008 financial crisis on the horizon. “The geomechanical experts always challenged us, with some people claiming that the data we produced was just noise, or too good to be true,” adds Christophe.
In some way, however, this challenge was a good thing, because he started looking at ways to prove that the data produced were not noise, and merely a result of different lithologies they scratched. So, he bought a camera with which he started recording the core at the same time as performing the scratch test.
“It was just a low-resolution webcam at first,” he laughs, “nothing to be too excited about. But it enabled us to plot the scratch test data onto the images to prove that the data had a relationship to the core material. On top of that, we started to automate a lot of things. And it worked, people started believing the data, now that we added a data track in the form of images to back up the scratch test results.”
Breaking into other disciplines
“Yet, we needed something else to break into other disciplines of the upstream oil and gas sector if we were to ever scale up significantly,” says Tanguy. “The geomechanics discipline is small and often unable to make key decisions.”
That became the focus during the years around 2013, when Tanguy came to Epslog from Shell. More sensors were added to the machine, further aided by university collaborations and the guidance of seasoned professionals such as Lutz Rieppe, who as custodian petrophysics for PETRONAS, had a lot to say about how to tune Epslog deliverables to real world business objectives.
Then, the big slump in oil price came in 2014. “Our project portfolio was hit, for sure, but we also turned this into an opportunity,” says Christophe, “and started investing into making our analysis much more efficient through automating workflows and making processing faster. All with the aim to reduce our prices and stay competitive.”
More data sooner
In 2017 the US patent on the scratch test expired, opening a path to the US market. The first steps in this new environment coincided with the strong recovery phase in the unconventional hydrocarbons sector following the 2014–2016 oil price crash. Here again, key individuals such as Robert Patterson were quick to recognize the potential of Epslog technology to transform core analysis for the better. Focus was on bringing “more data sooner”, being first to the core and optimizing operational speed while controlling the test footprint to leave the core intact for further analysis.
This philosophy led to important wins with the major players like Ovintiv and EOG in the field of unconventional hydrocarbons.
Don’t break my cores
“There was another reason why we needed to branch out to other disciplines beyond geomechanics,” adds Christophe. “Geologists initially hated us because we left a groove in the rock whilst scanning the core solely for geomechanical applications. By broadening our measurement portfolio, and positioning ourselves as the company that can do the scratch test before slabbing and plugging, we provided geologists with a great dataset with which they could subsequently determine a much better thought-through plugging campaign. As this unfolded, we suddenly became the geologists’ best friends!”
In 2019, the CoreDNA concept was ready to be deployed. From then on, the company could also provide useful data for petrophysical and sedimentological studies, such as automated grain size measurements, elemental analyses and ultra-high resolution images.
Far away
But being best friends doesn’t automatically bring in new business. Being located in Belgium, not really an oil and gas centre, and without a dedicated sales team, how do you enthuse new customers?
“And again, trust played a vital part,” says Christophe. “Jan Meltveit from Stratum Reservoir in Stavanger believed in our methodology and convinced companies of doing analyses with our kit – the results of which were then wired to Belgium for further analysis. It was a great recipe, a model that continues to this day.”
“The collaboration with Jenny Omma and John Cummings, both at Stratum Reservoir, is a great example of how a sound technical message is the best basis to establish long lasting trust, which in turns creates an excellent synergy with their combined expertise on detailed mineralogy analysis and sedimentology.”
“I must say the Norwegians are also very keen on quality data, and embracing innovation,” says Christophe. “Where the industry may seem weary for new technology in other places, this is absolutely the contrary for Norway.”
The stars aligned
And this model of having machines on site without having someone physically there arrived just in time, as the pandemic unfolded soon after the working relationship with Stratum got underway. “If we had not had this in place, our situation would have looked very differently now,” says Tanguy.
“Having that capacity to send data directly to the cloud for people to download it anywhere really arrived at the right time, when companies became much more open to this concept because of the restrictions we all experienced. It is a model that we continue to fine-tune to this day, further supported by our team who help develop all sorts of AI tools to further broaden our data analysis offering.”
“I studied space technology, but little did I know that I would work a few kilometers under ground, “Christophe concludes at the end of our conversation. As if it was written in the stars. Is that where Christophe got the inspiration to hire top talents? Today, Epslog can count on a cracking team of star engineers and exceptional scientists, all sharing the idea that CoreDNA is there to make a difference on how core data is preserved.
