Terra Firma Technology is currently developing applications for the oil industry to handle uncertainty in geological variables. These are being developed using Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications 5.0 and Excel 97. Using Office 97 as a starting point for application development speeds up both the decision making and the development process. The spreadsheet functionality in Excel 97 is ideal for the number crunching involved with Monte Carlo simulation. With VBA and Office 97 the development process becomes more of an assembly process, using an extensive set of off-the-shelf components that developers can add to and integrate in order to create custom business applications more quickly. As companies downsize mainframe based applications for PC based local area networks the importance of end-user applications (such as Excel) for software development becomes paramount.

Good programming skills aren't enough, developers have to know the best, most efficient practice in their fields. TFT has this experience and can translate the industry methods into user friendly and effective applications.

The development of the stochastic tools, using Monte Carlo simulation, is ongoing at TFT. An example of a small shareware software product is provided for download here. "Hydrocarbon Volume" is an Excel 97 spreadsheet running VBA 5.0. It will run on any machine using Windows 95 or NT running Microsoft Excel 97 from the Office 97 suite. It determines in-place and reserves for prospects and fields containing up to ten user defined reservoirs, waste zones and sealing layers. Data are not entered directly into the spreadsheet but via user forms, which ensures their validation. Custom help files provide context sensitive help for the user. Both Imperial and metric units are handled. The program is distributed as a self extracting archive. After downloading, read the readme.txt file for more information.

Download Hydrocarbon Volume Software