Our journey started in the early 1990s when dGB founders (Paul de Groot and Bert Bril) worked for TNO on a research project involving Neural Networks and stochastic pseudo-wells. The successful project led to the start of dGB in 1995.
A few years later a dramatic event took place in the North Sea: Equinor lost a drilling platform after a shallow-gas blowout. The aftermath sparked an investigation that uncovered a critical insight: subtle vertical noise trails in seismic data, later called seismic chimneys, indicate hydrocarbon migration. Mapping these could help prevent future disasters.
But mapping seismic chimneys by hand took many person-months per project. That’s when Equinor approached dGB, at the time, the only specialists on seismic pattern recognition.
The result? The Chimney Cube—a supervised learning solution using Neural Networks to automatically detect fluid migration paths. Not only did this revolutionize geohazard interpretation, it also gave explorers visibility into the entire petroleum system. Drilling success rates jumped from 50% to over 90% when using Chimney Cube interpretation.
Equinor funded a software development that over time became OpendTect—a seismic interpretation platform founded on machine learning and pattern recognition.
What Sets Us Apart?
- A user-friendly interface
- Full programming flexibility
- Library of trained Machine Learning Models
- Advanced synthetic data generation
- Access to a global geoscience data marketplace via TerraNubis
With 30+ years of experience in seismic interpretation and ML, we’ve built a platform that empowers geoscientists — from button push users to power programmers.
We’re proud of how far we’ve come—but we’d love to hear from you too.
👉 What’s your favorite feature or memory from working with our tools over the years? We’re considering turning your feedback into a dedicated webinar to celebrate our birthday—so don’t hold back.
Your ideas might shape the next 30 years of innovation.
Here’s to three decades of innovation—and to many more years of shaping the future of exploration technology.