Explorer Article

Google and Facebook recently introduced new initiatives related to climate science. Those moves generated further debate about the role – and responsibilities – of social media in regard to public discourse. Critics say that discouraging alternative viewpoints online can have negative consequences, largely because of the silo effects and bias reinforcement that already take place on social media.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

Since touching down at Octavia E. Butler Landing on the surface of Mars in February 2021, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has had an exciting and productive first nine months in Jezero crater, the 50-kilometer-wide impact crater it now calls home. The Perseverance rover is NASA’s newest flagship mission to Mars, and the first step of a multi-mission campaign to return samples from Mars back to Earth.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

C-Type, near Earth asteroids Ryugu and Bennu have been the subjects of recent robotic sampling missions. These missions have yielded valuable data relevant to the formation of the solar system and have important implications for the future of deep-space commerce.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Division Column EMD

There are many potential changes coming to AAPG and, by association, the Energy Minerals Division, but that doesn’t mean we should be static or complacent. New efforts now will help lay the groundwork for whatever the future holds. Worried EMD won’t exist in the NewOrg? Don’t! Whatever form a combined AAPG-SPE might take, there will certainly be a place for energy geoscientists interested in and working on the energy resources and issues currently addressed under the EMD umbrella. We might be working under a different name, but the need for a forum to discuss the array of resources being studied and developed by energy geoscientists will remain.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

The eastern Great Basin of western Utah has long been known as a high heat flow region containing young volcanic rocks and several producing hydrothermal systems. The Utah FORGE Enhanced Geothermal Systems project seeks to advance technology to extract the heat in the huge volumes of hot rock underground, identified or strongly suspected, that do not currently possess adequate permeability. Resolving the underlying mechanisms that have heated such volumes should not only help characterize the magnitude of an individual resource but also create a pathfinder for discovering other systems, both EGS and hydrothermal.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Geophysical Corner

Seismic inversion for acoustic impedance is widely used in our industry today, mainly due to the ease and accuracy of interpretation of impedance data, but also because it allows an integrated approach to geological interpretation. In a series of three prior articles of Geophysical Corner, the application of the different methods for transformation of stacked, prestack and multicomponent seismic data into impedance data were described. In this month’s column we revisit one of the methods, namely colored inversion, to describe in detail the methodology entailed and its application to a seismic dataset from Denmark.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Historical Highlights

It has become something of an old chestnut in the West that China will often claim to have achieved famous scientific advancements and inventions first, often hundreds of years before the West. The investigation of these sorts of disputes – and deciding who gets bragging rights – is probably best left to serious historical researchers, but there is firm evidence of many interesting early technical achievements from the Middle Kingdom. Ancient China’s development of deep drilling techniques predates similar advancements in the West by hundreds of years.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Emphasis Article

As the United States and other developed countries embrace the prospect of transitioning to renewable energy, the need for critical minerals is skyrocketing. Solar plants, wind farms and electric vehicles require more minerals to build than their fossil fuel-based counterparts. For example, a typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant, according to the International Energy Agency. Addressing the exploding need for critical minerals and how petroleum geoscientists can lead such efforts, members of AAPG’s Energy Minerals Division came together to discuss the future of critical minerals at the International Meeting for Applied Geoscience and Energy conference in Denver.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Emphasis Article

At a session entitled, “From Petroleum Industry to Energy Industry: Global Young Professionals’ Perspectives on a Sustainable Future,” at the International Meeting for Applied Geoscience and Energy conference recently held in Denver, speakers representing the World Petroleum Council’s Young Professionals Committee attributed their career decisions to the ongoing need for oil and gas, opportunities to help the industry decarbonize and a growing number of geoscience-related fields that are in need of their skillsets to thrive.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

Emphasizing that the oil and gas industry will continue to play an important role in supplying energy to the world for years to come, past AAPG President Charles Sternbach shared what he called “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Energy Geoscientists” at the 20th Michel T. Halbouty Lecture at the International Meeting for Applied Geoscience and Energy conference in Denver recently. “We need to be proud of our profession and we need to be proud of what energy and oil and gas do to bring good things to humanity,” said Sternbach.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Why H₂ is generated in subsurface? Which are the reactions and the promising geological setting? Example in countries where H₂ have already been found: Australia, Brazil. Kinetic reactions: i.e., Is the natural H₂ renewable? What we don't know yet about this resource and about the H₂ systems (generation/transport/accumulation). Overview of the current landscape (subsurface law, permitting, E&P activity)

Request a visit from Isabelle Moretti!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Climate change is not only happening in the atmosphere but also in the anthroposphere; in some ways the former could drive or exacerbate the latter, with extreme weather excursions and extreme excursions from societal norms occurring all over the earth. Accomplishing geoscience for a common goal – whether that is for successful business activities, resource assessment for public planning, mitigating the impacts of geological hazards, or for the sheer love of furthering knowledge and understanding – can and should be done by a workforce that is equitably developed and supported. Difficulty arises when the value of institutional programs to increase equity and diversity is not realized.

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Request a visit from Sherilyn Williams-Stroud!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

This presentation is a survey of subsurface machine learning concepts that have been formulated for unconventional asset development, described in the literature, and subsequently patented. Operators that utilize similar subsurface machine learning workflows and other data modelling techniques enjoy a competitive advantage at optimizing the development of unconventional plays.

Request a visit from Shane Prochnow!

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)
DL Abstract

For well over a century there have been conflicting indications of the strength of the crust and of faults and what controls them.  Much of our ignorance comes quite naturally from the general inaccessibility of the crust to measurement--in contrast with our understanding of the atmosphere, which is much more accessible to observation as well as more rapidly changing.  Crustal strength is best understood in deforming sedimentary basins where the petroleum industry has made great contributions, particularly in deforming petroleum basins because of the practical need to predict. In this talk we take a broad look at key issues in crustal strength and deformation and what we can learn from boreholes, earthquakes, active fault systems, and toy models.

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Request a visit from John Suppe!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Physics is an essential component of geophysics but there is much that physics cannot know or address. 

Request a visit from John Castagna!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Local sea-level changes are not simply a function of global ocean volumes but also the interactions between the solid Earth, the Earth’s gravitational field and the loading and unloading of ice sheets. Contrasting behaviors between Antarctica and Scotland highlight how important the geologic structure beneath the former ice sheets is in determining the interactions between ice sheets and relative sea levels.

Request a visit from Alex Simms!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
VG Abstract

The Betic hinterland, in the westernmost Mediterranean, constitutes a unique example of a stack of metamorphic units. Using a three-dimensional model for the crustal structure of the Betics-Rif area this talk will address the role of crustal flow simultaneously to upper-crustal low-angle faulting in the origin and evolution of the topography.

Request a visit from Juan I. Soto!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

Paleozoic North America has experienced multiple mountain building events, from Ordovician to Permian, on all margins of the continent. These have had a profound effect on the resulting complex basins and their associated petroleum systems. Subsequent uplift, erosion and overprinting of these ancient systems impedes the direct observation of their tectonic history. However, the basin sedimentary records are more complete, and provide additional insights into the timing and style of the mountain building events. In this study, we employ ~90 1D basin models, ~30 inverse flexural models, isopachs, and paleogeographic maps to better understand the Paleozoic history of North America.

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Request a visit from Kurt W. Rudolph!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

The Earth is not a fragile place, but our place on the Earth is very fragile. Geoscience offers a pathway to understand how the Earth has evolved and the role of biological life forms in that evolution.

Request a visit from Lesli Wood!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)

Other Interests

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