Exploration Consultants

The Exploration Consultants Group of Companies (ECL) provides a complete geoscience consultancy for the resource industries. ECL was established in 1969, primarily as a geological and geophysical consultancy to the oil industry. In 1972 the company expanded into the quality control (QC) business, providing consultants to supervise the acquisition of seismic data on behalf of client oil companies. For the next decade the company continued to broaden its services into such fields as reservoir characterisation and modelling. In the 1980.s the company entered into the software market and developed a range of industry standard products, which included the ECLIPSE Reservoir Simulation software. In 1985, the company was merged with Canadian company, Intera, and expanded into the North American market. In 1995 the Eclipse Software and Reservoir Engineering Consulting Divisions of the company were sold to Geoquest. Intera subsequently disposed of the smaller remaining divisions of the company and at this point the remainder of the original ECL management and consultants conducted a management buyout of the Seismic Acquisition, Navigation & Processing QC Consultancy Services of Intera and resumed operations under the ECL name, as ECL Group Plc.