The world has changed for exploration geologists, with new development tools such as horizontal drilling and large volume hydraulic fracturing available to help mitigate risk. The imperative to identify permeable facies, traps and oil migration pathways have changed to identifying large, in place hydrocarbon volumes, over-pressure cells and lithologies that respond well to hydraulic fracturing. This talk walks through the tools an exploration geologist should have in his analytical and technical toolkit that may not have been as important in the past, such as geochemistry, geomechanics, reservoir and frac modeling, capillary pressure analysis and big-date mapping techniques. We then review two case studies of how profitable unconventional resources were identified and developed using these tools.
The world has changed for exploration geologists, with new development tools such as horizontal drilling and large volume hydraulic fracturing available to help mitigate risk. The imperative to identify permeable facies, traps and oil migration pathways have changed to identifying large, in place hydrocarbon volumes, over-pressure cells and lithologies that respond well to hydraulic fracturing. This talk walks through the tools an exploration geologist should have in his analytical and technical toolkit that may not have been as important in the past, such as geochemistry, geomechanics, reservoir and frac modeling, capillary pressure analysis and big-date mapping techniques. We then review two case studies of how profitable unconventional resources were identified and developed using these tools.