This Month's Explorer Articles

In North America’s history of building pipelines to transport oil, natural gas and petroleum products, somewhere along the way, the process became political. By pulling the presidential permit on the Keystone XL pipeline, President Joe Biden sent a powerful message: Even if a pipeline benefits citizens and trade relations with important allies, and even if it has met or exceeded design and regulatory requirements and secured community support, its fate can ultimately be determined by a whim.

Throughout the past decade, Brazil’s pre-salt basins and giant deepwater oil discoveries have brought significant attention to the country and to the offshore South Atlantic. Though operating in the Brazilian pre-salt play promises billions of barrels of oil, it also requires billions of dollars in investment and technology, something just a handful of companies can bring to the table. While Petrobras and international companies focus their attention on the Brazilian offshore, a handful of Brazilian companies and foreign investors have focused inland, where they are quietly starting Brazil’s onshore revolution.

You might not know her name, but you definitely know her work. When you imagine the ocean floor, it is probably the Marie Tharp map that you see. As a major key to understanding plate tectonics, her work led to many important developments in identifying offshore drilling targets. The maps were displayed at the 100th anniversary of the Library of Congress in the Jefferson Building, along with treasures that included a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation and Lewis and Clark’s journals.

A ransomware cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline in May brought a short-term disruption of gasoline supplies to the East Coast of the United States. Experts warned the assault has longer-term implications for the oil and gas industry, and for the nation’s critical infrastructure. Following the attack, government agencies quickly vowed to strengthen the nation’s cybersecurity efforts. But the great majority of U.S. energy supply – more than three-quarters, by many estimates – is in the hands of private industry. The Colonial incident “reflects a historically lax cybersecurity culture in the oil and gas industry.”

It's been an amazing year… so many new opportunities while sprinting along the razor’s edge of existence! Early on, we did a lot of self-examination and strategic planning for a new AAPG. Part of the early short-term strategy was to cut and cut to bring the budget down to essential services and those programs that are sponsored by corporate or AAPG Foundation donations. At the same time, we began working on longer-term strategies. You have heard it said that “We are at our best when we prepare ourselves for the worst.” I would change that to say, “We are at our best when we prepare ourselves to avoid the worst!”

Increasing global concern about climate change and its impact on the environment and society has led to a variety of strategies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and find places to store it. Many companies are hard at work to perfect methods of carbon capture, use, and storage. Franek Hasiuk, associate scientist at Kansas Geological Survey, said CCUS is the best technology available to reduce emissions produced by the global economy. Hasiuk is part of a team of scientists working on the Integrated Midcontinent Stacked Carbon Storage Hub, a project to investigate subsurface geology in southwest Kansas and southwest Nebraska and demonstrate the viability of injecting CO₂ into underground rock layers.

When introducing his American Jobs Plan, President Biden promised it would invest “in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the Space Race.” To put that investment in perspective, the interstate highway system, encompassing 47,000 miles of roads, cost $500 billion in today’s dollars, adjusting for inflation; the Apollo Program, about $194 billion. The price of the American Jobs Plan: $2.3 trillion. Included is significant investment proposed for the energy sector, which includes expanding clean energy sector tax credits, offering block grants and increasing government purchasing power to aid the new renewable sector.

Two longtime AAPG members who share a passion for geology, a preference for exciting hobbies and a dedicated commitment to helping others have been named recipients of the AAPG Foundation’s top honors for 2021. Jerry Namy is this year’s recipient of the L. Austin Weeks Memorial Medal, the AAPG Foundation’s highest honor, given in recognition of extraordinary philanthropy and service directed to advance the mission of the AAPG Foundation. Stewart “Stew” Chuber is this year’s recipient of the Chairman’s Award, given to recognize those who have made extraordinary contributions – monetary or service – to the Foundation.

Easy%R₀ has been perhaps the most widely used model over the past 30 years to help calibrate paleothermal histories. It was published in the AAPG Bulletin in 1990 by Jerry Sweeney and me, and it is one of the most highly-cited articles in the Bulletin in the last 40 years. As the person who constructed the Easy%R₀ algorithm, I would like to share some of the drivers for how the parameters were chosen and why it is appropriate now to move on to more recent models that appear to be more universally correct.

Innovative geoscience education was celebrated and a bit of AAPG history was made as Clemencia Gómez was announced as this year’s recipient of the AAPG Foundation’s Inspirational Geoscience Educator Award. Gomez, a tenured professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, is the first educator from Latin America to receive the Foundation’s annual honor. She’s taught there since 2017, teaching courses in geodynamics, field geology, Quaternary geology and the economics of mining and oil projects.

The AAPG and the Society of Petroleum Engineers announce an exploration of the benefits and opportunities of a merger creating the energy professionals’ organization for the future. With unanimous consent from the AAPG Executive Committee and the SPE Board of Directors, a steering committee was created to explore opportunities to form a new combined organization in response to an evolving energy sector and challenging COVID-impacted market environment.