Tracking the Diffusion of Plurigaussian Simulations within Academia and into Industry: Retrospective Case-Study on a Discovery in the Earth Sciences

The mathematical method called Plurigaussian Simulations was invented in France in the 1990s for simulating the internal architecture of oil reservoirs. It rapidly proved useful in other domains in the earth sciences: mining, hydrology and history matching. This paper tracks its diffusion firstly within academia using citation data from Google Scholar, and then investigates whether it was really adopted by industry. As expected many published papers were co-authored by mining or oil companies, or by consulting firms. While this demonstrates a certain level of interest from industry we postulate that in some cases companies were merely “window-shopping”. Companies that continued to publish on this topic (i.e. “repeat co-authors”) had clearly adopted the method. But what about the others? Our survey shows that some sent their personnel for postgraduate training or to attend specialized short courses; others decided to get studies carried out by consulting firms rather than investing the time and effort in building up competency in-house.