Connect with Fast Company

The search is under way. Deep underground, a team of eight or so topflight geoscientists and engineers has assembled, hoping to find what everyone in the petroleum industry is seeking: vast new reserves of oil. How deep is the descent? Five miles down, where the temperature is more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Having set their sights on a promising oil field in the Gulf of Mexico -- a field as large as Houston's downtown metropolitan area -- the team members now face a daunting series of scientific, technical, and economic questions:

Is there oil down here? If so, how much? How can we get to it, and how much can we recover? Bottom line: How much will the whole shooting match cost? How much might it earn?

Of course, these petroleum treasure hunters don't actually conduct business more than 26,000 feet below the earth's surface. But they might as well, considering what they can see. Surrounded by a concave screen that stretches from floor to ceiling, they gaze into a rich digital image of the mysterious subsurface, an image that may look purely fantastic but is grounded in hard data -- millions upon millions of pages of data.

Welcome to the workplace of the future, in one of the world's most basic industries. It is an intriguing environment that its creator, Landmark Graphics Corp., calls a "Decisionarium." Part conference room, part laboratory, part theater, the Decisionarium is an oil company's dream. Equipped with 3-D goggles, geoscientists, engineers, and business managers surround themselves in state-of-the-art computer images, evaluating prospective reservoirs and drilling strategies like never before. They can analyze a model of Earth from every angle imaginable, simulating various geologic environments and well bores. After the real drilling begins, engineers conduct tests on the subsurface, and the images are updated with new data. The oil field looks like two colorful sheets of paper intersecting in deep, dark space; it could be origami from the Museum of Modern Art or the setting of the latest sci-fi thriller. The planes represent faults, or breaks, in the rocks where oil and water flow. The various bright spots suggest the presence of natural gas and petroleum (or, in the industry's pragmatic vernacular, "pay").

"If a picture's worth a thousand words, a 3-D picture is worth a million," says Jeff Coffman, 40, a senior application geophysicist at Landmark who conducts these digital underground journeys for customers. A million words? Millions of dollars is more like it.

Landmark is a high-powered, fast-growing software company that is changing the pace of a lumbering, slow-growth industry. A wholly owned Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton Co., Landmark estimates that more than 90% of the industry's major companies use its applications. Its products help geologists create a model of the oil basin and quickly target reservoirs. They help drilling engineers chart the most productive and cost-effective path for wells that twist and turn for miles underground. And they enable reservoir engineers to simulate the flow of subsurface oil and water, and to predict a well's daily barrel production.

But Landmark's mission extends beyond writing elegant code and translating mountains of complex data into detailed 3-D pictures. "This is not about handing our customers really cool tools and sending them off to play," says coo John Gibson, 42. "It's about teaching them how to make better decisions, faster. We are trying to reinvent our industry."