This Month's Explorer Articles

Talk of mitigating carbon footprints is growing louder. Regardless of differing views on the carbon issue, many in the oil and gas industry and beyond are beginning to make changes not only to be better stewards of the environment, but to protect business from growing public and investor sentiments against fossil fuels. Public opinion is now infiltrating investor sentiments and the industry needs to adopt significant changes that will keep the public and investors on board.

Scott Tinker, director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, will grant no quarter about either the history and benefits of energy in our lives or its potential to improve our future. “Access to affordable, reliable energy is the foundation of modern economies,” he said. This subject has been on his mind of late, for he has spent the last two years studying those who are, as he puts it, suffering from “energy poverty.” Some 2.5 billion people worldwide live in some form of energy poverty today. “Access to secure energy,” Tinker said, “impacts all other major humanitarian issues, including hunger, shelter, clean water, education, healthcare, human migration, empowerment of women, and more. Those who do not have energy access suffer from energy poverty.”

“As we are in the forefront of the oil boom associated with unconventional reservoirs, we are on a steep learning curve concerning related high-cost drilling and completion operations and we need to be aware of associated risks and do our best to minimize these risks and financial waste.” That’s Mamdouh A. Shebl, who has more than 34 years’ experience in unconventional reservoir development, and he has seen the protocols industry professionals take to assess the risks of such wells, both from an industry perspective as senior petrophysicist at Chevron’s MidContinent Business Unit, and from an academic one as petrophysics research professor at Texas A&M University. And he thinks the industry can do better.

In the summer of 1865, Thomas Bard arrived in Ventura County, Calif., to begin exploration drilling on properties owned by his uncle, Thomas Scott, in the area of Sulphur Mountain. Scott had made a fortune investing in Pennsylvania railroads in the 1850s and in Titusville oil fields in the early 1860s. Scott undertook petroleum exploration in California on the basis of sensational reports of the oil potential there published by Yale professor Benjamin Silliman in 1864. Writing to Scott about the Sulphur Mountain area, Silliman said, "Its great value is in its almost fabulous wealth in the best of oil."

With the advent of 3-D seismic technology and its remarkable spatial resolving power, mass transport deposits are better defined in terms of their full areal extent and their morphologic features in areas affected by slope failure. Though mass movements have been extensively studied within the Permian Basin, little work has been published on the nature of these MTDs and their related geomorphological expression on seismic. The goal of this study is to understand sediment flow and delineate the anatomy of the MTD that was deposited 275 million years ago in the Midland Basin. This feature was deposited in the Upper Leonard interval which overlies the Upper Spraberry formation.

A new named grant honoring the memory of an AAPG Honorary member – a pioneer and giant in the world of geological-geophysical integration – has been established by the AAPG Foundation. The R. Randy Ray Memorial Named Grant, intended to support students in petroleum geology, honors a geologist who was hailed during his career as being “a tireless volunteer,” praised for his efforts to advance integrated geoscience knowledge and training, and honored for having a “vision energized by optimism and enthusiasm.”

Traveling to the Middle East is something that I get a lot of questions about, particularly from colleagues and friends in the United States and Europe who have never done so. Based on the headlines they read, they’re surprised to hear me say that it is one of my favorite places to travel. The people of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia warmly welcomed IPTC attendees, and a spirit of hospitality pervades cultures in the Middle East. You need to experience it. And next month we, AAPG, together with EAGE and SEG, will enable you to do just that as we launch GEO 2020, the 14th Middle East Geosciences Conference and Exhibition in Bahrain, with the theme “Geosciences in the Digital World: 2020 and Beyond.”

What’s in a name? Should we call it a transition? A convergence? A transformation? A revolution? A tipping-point? A paradigm shift? Consider that perhaps the name is largely irrelevant, except to sell conference tickets. There’s a radical shift afoot that affects the business model for global energy delivery and consumption. And with it comes with a wealth of opportunities for energy geoscientists, as well as an obligation for every professional society to help its members prepare for the future.