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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Learn! Blog

Molly Turko has a passion for unraveling complex geological histories and it has taken her to fascinating field locations where there are still mysteries to solve. Join Molly as she shares her story and her favorite outcrops.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

Super basin applications and analogs continue to drive the future. As we learn more about them, we discover how valuable super basins are to exploration and development. As a result, AAPG continues its initiative to showcase some of the world’s greatest petroleum basins with the fourth Global Super Basins Leadership Conference.

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

The environment is in your face this year. Here in Los Angeles, we had one of the clearest springs that I can remember. All because the COVID-19 virus resulted in a huge shutdown of most everything that took us outdoors. Come summer and the fires struck the western states. The air turned brown and the visibility went to nearly zero. It stayed that way all the way to summer’s end. This was a huge wakeup call on how sensitive the atmosphere is to changes brought about by aerosols. This brings to mind a story about the biggest tourist attraction in the greater Los Angeles area in the late 19th and early 20th century.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Historical Highlights

During the 1980s, early prospecting in deepwater margins was the simple extension of prolific updip producing basins that were charged. However, the migration of petroleum exploration and development into deepwater was fraught with challenges. For engineers and geologists, one of our biggest challenges was to overcome our collective lack of understanding about the geology of deepwater. We had to revisit everything we thought we knew, one paradigm shift after another.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

The AAPG Women’s Network and the SEPM student community co-hosted a panel discussion in October with AAPG Executive Committee officers. While we addressed many of the audience’s questions during the event, we ran out of time before answering all of the important submitted questions. The panelists decided to share responses with the greater AAPG community through the EXPLORER.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Geophysical Corner

The past few years have seen increasing interest in the application of machine learning techniques in the industry, specifically in seismic interpretation. Over a clastic Tertiary clinoform interval in the public F3-Netherland dataset, we benchmarked advanced neural network algorithms against standard probabilistic lithology classifications from seismic data, to understand their benefits and limitations, and to check which approach works best under which circumstances.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Emphasis Article

Researchers generally say they are scrambling to keep up with the changing needs of the oil industry combined with the emerging, broader concerns of society. Amazingly, technology research for oil and gas continues to flourish even now, despite some recent problematic headwinds. And even though computing-related technology gets most of the attention these days, today’s energy research extends far beyond Big Data and its applications.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

As companies work toward developing alternative sources for a world with ever-increasing energy demands, energy minerals are moving to the forefront of the conversation. AAPG’s Energy Minerals Division finds itself in the spotlight these days for its work in prospecting alternative energy sources, such as geothermal and hydrates, for commercial use. “We’ve got good momentum right now with interest in alternative energy,” said Ursula Hammes, AAPG Member, EMD president and president at Hammes Energy and Consultants.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Emphasis Article

One of the cooler energy projects in development today addresses CO₂, methane, climate change and clean fuels, all at the same time. That’s “cooler” in the sense of using less heat, as well as being highly innovative in combining natural gas and carbon dioxide to generate fuel. The gas-to-liquids process is a research project of GTI in metropolitan Chicago, where it’s known as Cool GTL.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
DL Abstract

While there are many habitats that are associated with the deposition of organic-rich marine and lacustrine source rocks, one important pathway is linked to the onset of increased basin subsidence associated with major tectonic events. A key aspect is that this subsidence is spatially variable, with the uplift of basin flanks contemporaneous with the foundering of the basin center, resulting in a steeper basin profile.

Request a visit from Kurt W. Rudolph!

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)
VG Abstract

In comparison with the known boundary conditions that promote salt deformation and flow in sedimentary basins, the processes involved with the mobilization of clay-rich detrital sediments are far less well established. This talk will use seismic examples in different tectonic settings to document the variety of shale geometries that can be formed under brittle and ductile deformations.

Request a visit from Juan I. Soto!

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

President Biden has laid out a bold and ambitious goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions in the United States by 2050.  The pathway to that target includes cutting total greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and eliminating them entirely from the nation’s electricity sector by 2035. The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management will play an important role in the transition to net-zero carbon emissions by reducing the environmental impacts of fossil energy production and use – and helping decarbonize other hard-to abate sectors.

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Request a visit from Jennifer Wilcox!

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)
DL Abstract

Subsurface risk and uncertainty are recognized as very important considerations in petroleum geoscience. And even when volume estimates are relatively accurate, the reservoir characteristics that determine well placement and performance can remain highly uncertain. In analyzing results and work practices, three aspects of uncertainty are reviewed here.

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)
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

Three-dimensional (3D) seismic-reflection surveys provide one of the most important data types for understanding subsurface depositional systems. Quantitative analysis is commonly restricted to geophysical interpretation of elastic properties of rocks in the subsurface. Wide availability of 3D seismic-reflection data and integration provide opportunities for quantitative analysis of subsurface stratigraphic sequences. Here, we integrate traditional seismic-stratigraphic interpretation with quantitative geomorphologic analysis and numerical modeling to explore new insights into submarine-channel evolution.

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Request a visit from Jacob Covault!

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)

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