The company name refers to the analysis of geological stresses in the Earth’s crust. More to the point, PSI’s work enables petroleum explorers and producers to boost drilling performance and help maximise oil recovery from new and existing fields.

It also has the potential to save the industry hundreds of millions of dollars by avoiding stress-related downhole problems.

That’s no idle boast as the company has already completed upwards of 50 projects around the world with a high success rate and has caught the attention of French-headquartered global service company Schlumberger as well as international oil majors like Shell.

During the last two years, PSI has kept a relatively low profile, trialling the technique and applying for software patents in 30 countries in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and South-East Asia/Australasia, which contain major petroleum provinces.

With these arrangements now in place, the company is ready to launch the software as a commercial package onto the global petroleum industry market.

The technique and the company is the brainchild of Australian geological consultant and structural expert, John Davidson.

Among past successes, he was the first to point to a promising prospect called Yolla in the Bass Basin during the early 1980s. More recently he has been renowned for his series of structural petroleum geology courses conducted in the south of England as well as other venues around the world.

Speaking from Brisbane in his new additional role as founder and chief executive of PSI, Davidson explains that geological stress causes a number of expensive problems for the petroleum industry, including distortion of the circular shape of a drill hole and sometimes the collapse of the well.

“It has been known for some time that plate tectonics causes horizontal stress in the Earth’s crust, but there are also small vertical stresses caused by the flexing up and down of the continents,” he said.

“These vertical forces, sometimes referred to as ‘the Earth’s heartbeat’, change the curvature of the Earth and produce horizontal compression. Locally this causes circular wells to become elliptical.

“If the rock being drilled is hard, the distortion isn’t great and may not cause a problem.

“However if the rock is soft, significant well distortion may become apparent within a few days or even hours. The result is a stuck bit or, at worst, a complete hole collapse forcing a costly abandonment.”

Davidson says that pre-1985, most wells were drilled vertically and collapses were put down to bad luck.

“In retrospect luck had nothing to do with it. The horizontal squeeze was greater than we thought at the time. The modern practice of drilling horizontal wells has made predicting and planning for this phenomenon far more critical.

“We needed to know the direction of stress at the well location. Up until now the industry practice has been to estimate the direction and magnitude of the stress by extrapolating from other wells in the area.

“If there weren’t any nearby wells, we’d use distant earthquake data and even plate tectonic theory.”

“The trouble is, stress direction can change in less than 2km,” Davidson said. “That means the extrapolation technique is not reliable. We needed a better way.”

It wasn’t until he was talking to a colleague in Norway about stress measurements taken in the Snorre field in the North Sea that Davidson realised the required stress information could be hidden in the seismic data that is routinely acquired by companies during the early stages of exploration in an area.

With the help of John Goodwood, formerly with Brisbane software solutions company Mincom, he put together a software package that enables prediction of the degree and direction of geological stress using interpreted seismic data.

Data from a 3D survey is the best, but good quality 2D data is also acceptable.

He points out that the seismic data records subsurface deformation and he suggests the stress-finding technique will aid a cross-section of petroleum industry tasks and professions.

“Drilling engineers can use the information to plan the optimum direction for both exploration and production wells.”

“It is inviting problems if wells are drilled against the direction of maximum stress,” he said. “This is particularly important when tackling a field development program from a fixed platform where the number of drilling slots is limited.

“Reservoir engineers can use the stress direction determination to predict which natural rock fractures will be open and therefore of use during production.

“Similarly, knowledge about the natural direction of stress in a reservoir is an aid when planning fraccing programs.

“And when looking at various prospects and leads, field geologists can use the sub-surface picture we generate to evaluate traps and determine which faults are likely to be sealed and which are leaking.”

“An additional, overarching benefit is that the technique provides a common language that will help communication between geologists, geophysicists and engineers,” he said.

PSI has undertaken a number of successful trials on a consultancy basis in the North Sea for Hurricane Exploration (west of Shetlands) as well as for Shell and Schlumberger (in the Viking Graben).

The company is also consulting with Adelaide explorer/producer Stuart Petroleum in South Australia’s Cooper Basin.

Davidson says he is keen to interest other Cooper Basin players like Santos and Beach as well as the major companies in Australia and globally.

“There are two ways we can go about the marketing. Either we sell it as a package and maintain it on a regular (possibly yearly) basis, or we simply lease the technology.”

“I’m leaning towards the latter,” he said. “Either way we’d send out a trainer to teach customers how to use the software. That, of course, means we need to train the trainers.”

Davidson has also given thought to the future direction of PSI as a company and again he’s decided to keep it simple.

“We’ll remain private – at least for the moment. Technical concepts like ours are hard to sell in a public float.

“And we’ll stick to stress measurement and direction finding rather than try to branch out into other related areas.

“However, we will need to establish several offices to cater for the global market. Brisbane will remain the home base but a presence in London will be a high priority.

“That will give us access to North Sea players as well as the Russian/European and West African markets. The follow-up would be Houston for the American scene.”

Davidson maintains that with new oil becoming harder and more expensive to find, the PSI software package offers a way to ensure exploration wildcats and wells to maximise production from existing fields are targeted to best effect.