Marches. Protests. Sanctions. Power struggles. Thanks to 24-hour broadcasting and social media, news of Venezuela’s political and economic crisis has reached the four corners of the Earth. But how does South America’s petroleum powerhouse affect the geoscientists living within its borders? What goes on in workplaces and classrooms far away from cameras? The EXPLORER talked with students, professors and professionals to find out how the crisis is affecting them.
We analyze western Caribbean structural styles and depositional controls associated with Late Cretaceous–Cenozoic deformational events using a 1600-km (994-mi)-long, regional, northwest–southeast transect extending from the Cayman Trough in Honduras to northern Colombia.
What are your resolutions for the new year? I have two suggestions. First, get involved and stay involved with the AAPG. Second, seek certification from the AAPG Division of Professional Affairs. You will not regret keeping these resolutions. It is an investment in your career.
The Energy Minerals Division celebrated its 25th Anniversary in 2002. The Division emphasized to the AAPG membership that it was AAPG’s center of activity on energy minerals and unconventional energy resources. EMD originally focused primarily on coal, uranium, geothermal energy, oil shales and tar sands. However, its focus expanded and in 2002, EMD’s most active unconventional resource areas were coalbed methane, gas hydrates, and unconventional energy economics.
Where are the best opportunities in the future for exploration investment? The central question about where to look, where to drill, which area of the world holds the greatest promise, in terms of profits, the rule going forward may very well be: “When you go low, you go high.”
With OPEC increasingly overshadowed by Saudi Arabia and Russia’s cooperation, and the United States’ escalating production, who holds the power in the global oil arena?
Mountains and beaches. Colonial cities, farming communities, indigenous villages. Central Eastern Mexico is full of diverse cultures and landscapes. It is also home to the Tampico-Misantla super basin, a 25,000-square-kilometer area that has produced oil since 1869.
By the time they are drilled, almost all exploratory ventures today will have been geotechnically, statistically and economically analyzed to estimate their ultimate recovery of oil or natural gas, or its EUR, and its present monetary value, or PV, given discovery. This process is generally known as “exploration risk analysis” and it evolved primarily as a response to an endemic problem: explorers were discovering less than half of the EURs they forecast for their investors.
Studies of lacustrine carbonate rocks in continental rifts have received huge interest in recent years because of their great economic value in the South Atlantic.
Notwithstanding the increases in oil prices we’ve seen in recent years, the cost controls put in place in response to the downturn persist. And it’s not just E&P companies looking to the future and tightening their belts. The major oil and gas producing economies are, too.
The volume documents shale tectonics from a variety of basins around the world, including the southern Beaufort Sea; the Krishna-Godavari Basin, India; the Niger Delta; eastern offshore Trinidad; offshore Brunei; and along the Spanish arm of the Mediterranean Sea. Product #1023. Price: Member $99/List $139
This volume is an ultimate resource for reading the story and history of fractures in rocks from core. It is a “must-have” volume for all who have, or wish to have, an intimate knowledge of the rocks they work with from a fracture point of view. (Product #1300. Member price $150 / List price $150.)
This 18-chapter volume is small enough to focus on the interplay among tectonics, sedimentation, and petroleum systems. Yet it is big enough to cover the diversity of structural styles in important petroliferous sedimentary basins around the globe. Product #1174. Price: Member $174 / List $174.
A collection of both qualitative and quantitative data on deep-water outcrops from around the world, this volume contains 154 chapters, and includes papers on all seven continents and 21 countries. Product #736. Price: Member $189/List $239.