I'm Jackson Caines, technology reporter, and this is Tech Trends with Hart Energy Live. 

Sharp Reflections is rumbling with activity. They're helping operators work with richer seismic data sets to better manage their reservoirs in a timely manner. Their new software is definitely a tech trend we're paying attention to. 

Computing advances have made it possible to quickly interpret time lapse seismic data volumes. Sharp Reflections President and CEO Bill Shea claims this is critical because time-lapsed data sets contain a vast volume of data that can go stale, if not interpreted and acted upon quickly. Part of managing a reservoir means knowing how that reservoir is changing over time, which is why time lapse, or 4D seismic, is important. 

But for time lapse data to be useful, it has to be timely. 

As Shea says, "think of time-lapse seismic as fresh grocery goods. Data goes stale really fast. If you acquired it and it took you two months to process it, it's only reliably giving you the basis to make drilling decisions for a few months after the day becomes available. After that, there's another survey coming in."

Sharp Reflections has soft launched its time lapse toolkit and expects to fully commercialize it later this year. 

Until then, this is Tech Trends with Hart Energy Live. Every Tuesday we'll have a new episode drilling into the tech that fuels the oil patch on hartenergy.com/ep.