This Month's Explorer Articles

Proposals to ban hydraulic fracturing in the United States have drawn a wide range of responses from analysts, with projected effects ranging from cataclysmic to trifling. Legislation to phase out fracturing was introduced in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives earlier this year. That turned up the heat on the controversy, as did the emergence of Sen. Bernie Sanders as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders and Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced a bill titled the “Ban Fracking Act” in January.

It is one of the most remote places on the planet and home to the largest sand desert in the world. Virtually uninhabited and underexplored, the Rub’ al Khali basin, known as “the Empty Quarter” in Arabic, covers more than a fourth of the southeastern part of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. While the area has been explored in the past, perhaps most notably by Max Steineke, the American geologist known for making the first oil discovery in Saudi Arabia in 1938, and then publicly again in the early 2000s by international oil companies, the basin appears to be of increasing interest once more.

In 1994, while chairman and CEO of Barrett Resources, I got a call from my good friend Ray Thomasson, who said, “Bill I have a prospect Larry McPeek has worked up in the Wind River Basin that you might find interesting.” I’d worked every feature of geology in Wyoming’s Wind River Basin and was familiar with about every well drilled there during my career, so I frankly considered myself somewhat of an expert on the basin ... The Cave Gulch Prospect was located along the Owl Creek Thrust in a geologically complex area.

The bandwidth of a signal is a measure of the breadth of its spectrum, often expressed as the distance measured in Hertz between the half-power points of a smooth spectrum. Bandwidth is the best measure of resolution. Although first introduced to the seismic community in the 1970s, only a limited number of published papers show the value of this attribute. In this column, we show the value of bandwidth when applied to data from the Utica area of Eastern Ohio, United States and from the Gulf of Mexico.

The maturing carbon market is a major driver for carbon capture, utilization and storage projects. Both the subsurface technical knowledge and related data sets of the petroleum industry are major inputs required for the world to successfully move toward a carbon-neutral and sustainable energy future. To that end, one of the goals of the Division of Environmental Geosciences in representing AAPG is to promote what petroleum geologists can offer during an evolving energy future.

As weeks and months passed after the 9/11 attacks, the attention of my bosses on Capitol Hill began to expand from direct response to prevention. We started talking about resilience. Resilience is “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; or the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape.” Toughness and elasticity also describe these qualities. Yes, we must harden systems where possible. Closing obvious vulnerabilities is critical. But hardened systems also reduce flexibility. At the extreme they can be stifling and brittle. And we cannot reduce the risks of life to zero, so we must cultivate the ability to bounce back when something bad happens.