Explorer Director’s Corner

While shale oil and shale gas deliver quick returns and product to markets, it’s the deepwater and other offshore discoveries that yield significant reserve additions and long-lasting production.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Geophysical Corner

In Oklahoma, seismic reflection data from different areas show distinct, systematic patterns of reflectors within depth intervals dominated by the crystalline basement. It is necessary to better understand the origin and composition of these characteristic layers in the Oklahoma basement, as it will fill a major gap in the understanding of its tectonic and thermal history.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

While oil production has been going strong in Argentina’s Neuquén Basin for the past 100 years, geologists with Shell and YPF say the region’s true hydrocarbon potential has yet to be discovered.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Geophysical Corner

Amplitude variation with offset or angle has been widely used for discriminating hydrocarbons from brine-saturated rocks. Such analyses are based on Zoeppritz equations that describe the partitioning of energy at a rock interface into reflected and refracted energy components. These equations are complicated and, to get an intuitive understanding of their capabilities and limitations, various investigators and researchers have provided approximations by adopting some simplifying assumptions.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Historical Highlights

The Casablanca oil field, discovered in 1975 and located on the Mediterranean shelf edge, has been greatly significant in the world’s offshore oil industry activity, besides being by far the biggest oil field in Spain.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

The University Centre in Svalbard, in the Norwegian high Arctic archipelago, has created a geoscientific database for high Arctic training and research, a unique approach to the retrieval, coordination and cataloging of data in a less than hospitable area.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Geophysical Corner

Coherence and curvature attribute computations are usually carried out on stacked seismic data volumes to delineate faults, flexures and large fractures. If the vertically-aligned parallel fractures in the subsurface are filled with fluid, or weakly cemented, the P-wave velocity across the fractures will be slower than that parallel to the fractures. These differences give rise to a velocity variation with azimuth. Because impedance is the product of density and velocity, such fractures also give rise to amplitude variation with offset.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

It was only expected to produce for 30 years. But now, 40 years later, BP looks forward to another 40 years of production in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

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.”

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

An old joke used to be told in Israel: Why did Moses so unwittingly lead the Jewish people to the land of milk and honey and not to one of its petroleum-rich neighbors? Not anymore. In the last decade, giant gas fields have been discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea offshore Israel, and offshore gas is rapidly becoming the main source of energy for power generation.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
VG Abstract

In comparison with the known boundary conditions that promote salt deformation and flow in sedimentary basins, the processes involved with the mobilization of clay-rich detrital sediments are far less well established. This talk will use seismic examples in different tectonic settings to document the variety of shale geometries that can be formed under brittle and ductile deformations.

Request a visit from Juan I. Soto!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) seismic-reflection surveys provide one of the most important data types for understanding subsurface depositional systems. Quantitative analysis is commonly restricted to geophysical interpretation of elastic properties of rocks in the subsurface. Wide availability of 3D seismic-reflection data and integration provide opportunities for quantitative analysis of subsurface stratigraphic sequences. Here, we integrate traditional seismic-stratigraphic interpretation with quantitative geomorphologic analysis and numerical modeling to explore new insights into submarine-channel evolution.

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Request a visit from Jacob Covault!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Around 170 million years ago, the Gulf of Mexico basin flooded catastrophically, and the pre-existing landscape, which had been a very rugged, arid, semi-desert world, was drowned beneath an inland sea of salt water. The drowned landscape was then buried under kilometers of salt, perfectly preserving the older topography. Now, with high-quality 3D seismic data, the salt appears as a transparent layer, and the details of the drowned world can be seen in exquisite detail, providing a unique snapshot of the world on the eve of the flooding event. We can map out hills and valleys, and a system of river gullies and a large, meandering river system. These rivers in turn fed into a deep central lake, whose surface was about 750m below global sea level. This new knowledge also reveals how the Louann Salt was deposited. In contrast to published models, the salt was deposited in a deep water, hypersaline sea. We can estimate the rate of deposition, and it was very fast; we believe that the entire thickness of several kilometers of salt was laid down in a few tens of thousands of years, making it possibly the fastest sustained deposition seen so far in the geological record.

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Request a visit from Frank Peel!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)

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