For some in the profession, the passion to understand the moment of change in the geosciences fuels them for a lifetime of work.
Roberto Hernández, this year’s Robert R Berg Outstanding Research Award winner, will tell you that very notion – that moment of discovery – has always fascinated him.
“From my early days studying geology in Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), I understood that there was a problem, a variable that was little or nothing known, which was absolute time – that is, the age of a rock or the moment in which an event occurred, a key piece of information for understanding whether or not processes coexisted spatially,” he explained.
A Career Built on Time and Change
Hernández began his professional career with the evolutionary analysis of the filling of the sedimentary basins of the Eastern Cordillera of the Central Andes of Argentina (Tres Cruces, Jujuy Province), an area that covered rocks from the Ordovician period to the present day.
“It’s more important to identify and characterize the moment when changes occur in a geological system and their spatial location than it is to understand the process preserved in the rock record itself in order to understand the petroleum system,” he said. “This was the concept we developed, implemented and promoted together with Andres Boll.”
He said geologists, when they make mistakes, make this one: “They confuse the moment when a change occurred in one place with another place.”
For him, scientists should always see, in a sense, what’s not in front of them.
“Based on this dynamic conceptualization of geology, I have always been passionate about time and changes in the speed of processes,” he said.
Throughout that career, Hernandez, who lives in Salta, Argentina and is currently president of the technologybased companies Geomap S.A. and La. Te. Andes S.A., said that dynamic – the when and where such anomalies happen – has made his mark on the industry by studying the deformation of the Central Andes, contributing to the advancement of the concepts of structural geology in foldand-thrust belts, promoting, and analyzing structural modeling software for the Central Andes, Andino 3D, which includes thermochronological data, promoting, in this case, science applied to the oil and gas industry with two internationally renowned professionals, Ernesto Cristallini and Richard Ketcham.
Specifically, he points to his efforts on high-resolution sequence stratigraphy in the Upper Cretaceous and Lower Cenozoic in northwestern Argentina as being one of the highlights of his more than 40 years in the industry.
“The aforementioned was undoubtedly a critical starting point where I understood the need for innovation based on research applied to the times of record and nonrecord in the petroleum system,” he said.
He admits he never thought that work he carried out with YPF, Argentina’s national energy company, between 1982 and 1990 would become, in 2010, an important contribution to a nomenclature of high-frequency sequence stratigraphy.
But it did.
As it turned out, it had enormous utility and application in the spatial analysis of reservoir, seal and source rocks for the development of conventional productive fields in the offshore of Brazil with Petrobras, in the much-named Pré-Sal interval.
His entire methodological development through the years was transformed into an educational project, implemented side-by-side with Guilherme Raja Gabaglia, through which more than 500 upstream professionals have already been trained, leading to a significant conceptual update. To this day, doctoral theses, master’s degrees, new technological applications and, above all, the incorporation of hydrocarbon reserves and greater efficiency in their recovery/extraction continue to be produced using these methods.
“During that same period, that is, in the 1980s and 1990s, at the height of conventional exploration in the Central Andes, we had the obligation to understand not only the distribution of reservoir, seal and source rocks and the geometry of the trap, but also the kinematics of deformation with the history of sedimentary loading that originated in the synclines to mature the organic matter,” he said.
“At this stage in my professional career, Teresa Jordan, Richard Allmendinger and James Reynolds appeared, and with them magnetostratigraphy ‘linked’ to dating, further deepening my goal of contributing to a more quantitative geology,” he added.
There two variables that were difficult to obtain, however, given the technological reality of the time in South America, especially in Argentina and Bolivia: When the deformations occurred, and how the temperature evolved over time, as marked by the current vitrinite in the source rock.
And that’s because, he said, “Interpretations always had the weakness of being model-dependent in some way.”
So he focused on understanding the scale of temporal determination of seismic reflection surfaces, first in 2-D and then in 3-D, but that was not enough. In the process, he had to find technological tools whose data would corroborate or rule out the proposed model.
“I realized that absolute dating, that is, analytically determining the age of a rock as accurately as possible using the technology available, was a possible solution.”
Breakthrough
In 2010 and subsequent years, he said there was a significant scenario that emerged “that would change the approach and way of thinking about our geological system.”
“We were working in the Sub-Andean System of Bolivia and realized that it was no longer possible to continue working as we had been doing until then. The degree of ignorance of space-time variables led to the conclusion that it was unfeasible to continue working without thinking about geology in quantitative terms. It was impossible to consider the variables and uncertainties of petroleum systems without ages, without data on the evolution of the temperature to which the source rock was subjected over time, and without knowing the moments and speed at which the traps were deformed. It was a very important moment,” said Hernández.
“This was not an individual discovery but a collective effort in which Juan Hernandez and Alejandra Dalenz Farjat played an indispensable role,” he added.
Hernández talks as well about events that were critical to his understanding not only on the variables of base level changes in a basin (globally, sea level change over time), but to developing climate change variables at different scales of their cyclicity linked to changes in tectonic velocities of sediment accommodation in the subAndean basins of the Central Andes or the exhumation of structures or traps.
“Understanding these variables based on absolute time data led to the innovation of new petroleum systems related to this knowledge,” he said. He has collaborated with the innovation of the petroleum system in the northern Sub-Andean region of Bolivia in the recent discovery of the Mayaya Centro x1 well.
“Such work helped make it possible to identify a migration time that is older than previously thought in that part of the Central Andes,” Hernández said.
Of that work, he added, “The other unique and perhaps most important achievement was to bring a group of geoscientists from the oil and gas industry – scientists and technical workers who pursued with the same passion and determination the integration of geological processes in the petroleum system to adjust the rates of change that were occurring and thus predict exploration and production designs in primary and secondary reservoirs related to the formation of more traps, having extended the generation time.”
Encouraging a ‘Virtuous Circle’
That coming together, that collaboration, led in no small measure to the Geothermocronology Center in Argentina, La. Te. Andes S.A., which he helped form to encourage what he calls a “virtuous circle” between public and private business alliances.
It was the first of its kind on South America.
He had skin in the game – his company.
“It arose as a strategic need raised by Geomap S.A. and the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, the country’s primary organization, to promote scientific and technological research and development in the region and to help coordinate and expedite oil exploration, which normally took up to five years,” he said.
With additional help from the National Atomic Energy Commission and funds from the Argentine government through the Inter-American Development Bank, and support of the University of Heidelberg (specially Ulrich Glasmacher), projects started moving forward.
“Without strategic alliances, it would not have been possible in Argentina and Bolivia to come up with a solution that reduces the risk of exploration in conventional traps and in the folded belt of the Central Andes and the adjustment of generation in conventional traps.”
On that notion of the “virtuous circle,” he said, “It is a way to shield or protect new ideas economically from previous methodologies.”
As for what the geoscience industry can do, specifically, to strengthen the relationships between the state, private industry and scientists, he said they must understand “that innovative small businesses are the key to their own growth and to products related to knowledge and quality.”
In order to make this link successful, support must be directed to private suppliers through agreements and contracts that aim to solve corporate technological problems with shortterm solutions based on applied science from open research and development projects.
“It is the small private company that must ensure that science is geared toward the problem posed by the corporation or operator of hydrocarbon areas,” he said.
In his career, Hernández readily acknowledges the help of professors along the way, like Luis Spalletti from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata who introduced him to the world of sedimentology, but said it was a meeting in 1987 with geologist, the late Miguel Uliana, that forever changed his career arc.
It was Uliana who told him, “Geological processes must be understood in terms of speeds and changes.”
And it is that sentiment he wants to pass on to the next generation of geologists and researchers.
“I would tell them that they have to learn not to accept paradigms,” said Hernández.
He said it is essential to understand that the main enemy of development is our prejudice against change.
There will be changes; there will be similarities.
There will be new and advance technology, reducing exploration risk and its impact on the environment.
He reminds us, though, that, “Surely, in 10, 20 and 30 years, we will continue to use energy from hydrocarbons.”