1962 Paper E

AUTOMATIC DIGITIZING OF WELL LOGS

Edward Gordon United Gas Corporation Shreveport, Louisiana

ABSTRACT

The increasing availability of high speed digital computers, such as the IBM 7090, has encouraged the development of digital techniques to aid in the analysis and interpretation of well logs. Several of these developments have progressed to the point where they are providing economically useful results.

A major obstacle to wider use of these digital analysis techniques has been the relatively high cost of converting the enormous amount of data contained on a well log into a form where it can be efficiently entered into the digital computer for processing. Some progress towards solving this well log digitizing problem has been made with the use of semi-automatic curve readers or followers, but costs are in the neighborhood of $5 for each one thousand digitized readings.

A similar problem was faced by gas pipeline companies with respect to reading millions of orifice meter charts. This problem has been solved by the development of a fully automatic device, the Electroscanner, which can be "read" an orifice meter chart in ten seconds. A scanning device, based upon the same operating principles, is being built to digitize well logs. In this paper, the operating principles of the Electroscanner and their application to digitizing well logs are discussed.