Explorer Article

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: AAPG Member Glen Penfield’s life-changing discovery of the Chicxulub asteroid crater is the subject of a new movie.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

The eastern Great Basin of western Utah has long been known as a high heat flow region containing young volcanic rocks and several producing hydrothermal systems. The Utah FORGE Enhanced Geothermal Systems project seeks to advance technology to extract the heat in the huge volumes of hot rock underground, identified or strongly suspected, that do not currently possess adequate permeability. Resolving the underlying mechanisms that have heated such volumes should not only help characterize the magnitude of an individual resource but also create a pathfinder for discovering other systems, both EGS and hydrothermal.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

“One of the drives I always had has been to explore beyond the visible horizon.” Those are the sentiments from this year’s Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award winner, Daniele Colombo, senior geophysical consultant for Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

'Conventional geothermal reservoirs are characterized by a heat source, hydrothermal convection, and sufficient natural permeability to allow for fluid migration. Recognizing the geologically restricted occurrence of natural sites, additional opportunities have been sought. Enhanced geothermal systems are reservoirs in hot rock that lack the natural permeability required for fluid movement. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy initiated a program to test and develop new technologies for characterizing, creating and sustaining EGS reservoirs under natural field conditions. A site approximately 350 kilometers south of Salt Lake City Utah was selected for the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, or “FORGE” laboratory. '

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

Some 257 people gathered at the beautiful new Hilton Hotel in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea in the last week of February 2020 to attend the first AAPG/EAGE Papua New Guinea Petroleum Geoscience Conference and Exhibition. The theme for the conference was, “PNG’s Oil and Gas Industry Maturing Through Exploration Development and Production.”

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Geophysical Corner

Though machine learning techniques promise capabilities to sift through “big” data, interactive visualization of the generated attributes that make an effective use of color continue to be lacking. In order to effectively visualize seismic data/attributes in color, we need first to understand how color is perceived by the human eye and then how such colors are rendered on workstation monitors.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Historical Highlights

The Chixchulub crater on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula was long believed to be the result of volcanic activity, until one young geologist with a No. 2 pencil, some drafting triangles and a calculator made an earth-shattering discovery.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Historical Highlights

I landed in Bogota in June 1963 for employment with Texpet Colombia. Exploration of the asymmetrical Putumayo sub-Andean Basin had begun in the 1940s when Texpet sent exploration geologists to document any surface outcrops, but the area was still too remote for further exploration. Ten years later, Texpet drilled some two dozen core wells without finding oil. Then, in 1962, exploration picked up and the company moved a houseboat from the Amazon up the Rio Putumayo to a site upstream from the small, remote river town of Puerto Asis.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Geophysical Corner

In Oklahoma, seismic reflection data from different areas show distinct, systematic patterns of reflectors within depth intervals dominated by the crystalline basement. It is necessary to better understand the origin and composition of these characteristic layers in the Oklahoma basement, as it will fill a major gap in the understanding of its tectonic and thermal history.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Explorer Article

The University Centre in Svalbard, in the Norwegian high Arctic archipelago, has created a geoscientific database for high Arctic training and research, a unique approach to the retrieval, coordination and cataloging of data in a less than hospitable area.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Thursday, 10 May 2012, 12:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.

Recognition and Correlation of the Eagle Ford, Austin Formations in South Texas can be enhanced with High Resolution Biostratigraphy, fossil abundance peaks and Maximum Flooding Surfaces correlated to Upper Cretaceous sequence stratigraphic cycle chart after Gradstein, 2010.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Thursday, 9 February 2012, 12:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.

Projects in several shales will be discussed, including Marcellus, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Fayetteville, Montney, and Barnett, as will several seismically-detectable drivers for success including lithofacies, stress, pre-existing fractures, and pore pressure.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Thursday, 19 August 2010, 12:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.

This presentation will show where there are cases of missing sections, but none of them can be attributed to normal faulting.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Friday, 20 January 2012, 12:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.

The Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas is one of the more exciting shale plays in the United States at the current time.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Thursday, 23 July 2009, 12:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.

As commodity prices have dropped, many shale plays have become uneconomical as statistical plays and have increasingly become recognized as geological plays demanding new insights from data.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Thursday, 4 October 2012, 12:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.

Effective hydraulic fracture stimulation is critical for shale development, and microseismic is the only technology able to map the growth of these hydraulic fracture networks.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Thursday, 30 October 2014, 10:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m.

Cross disciplinary workflows play an important part of successful characterization of shale reservoirs. This course discusses how the artificial kerogen maturity of organic-rich Green River shale affects the petrophysical, micro-structural, geochemical and elastic properties.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Webinar
Virtual Webinar
Thursday, 2 July 2020, 4:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.

Presented by Kevin C. Hill, Associate Professor, University of Melbourne Gravity modelling of Australia's southern margin reveals that the initial rift with Antarctica was beneath the current Ceduna Delta. A regional, high-quality seismic traverse from the coast to oceanic crust across the Bight Basin has been assembled and interpreted in detail, then balanced, restored, decompacted, and replaced at paleo-water depths. The Late Cretaceous Ceduna Delta developed above a Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous rift basin in three stages punctuated by significant pulses of uplift and erosion across areas >100 km wide and with up to 1 km of erosion. The Cenomanian White Pointer delta prograded into deepening water and hence underwent gravitational collapse. This was terminated in the Santonian when the Antarctic margin was pulled out from below, thus supplying heat to a remnant thicker outer margin crust, causing doming and erosion. Importantly, this established the saucer-shaped geometry of the Ceduna Delta that persisted throughout its development, so that any hydrocarbons generated in the southern half of the basin would have migrated towards this outer margin high. The Tiger Formation was deposited in shallow water in a full rift basin prior to breakup, which was followed by regional thermal subsidence. The Hammerhead delta developed on the newly formed passive margin but was terminated by another pulse of uplift and erosion, perhaps associated with a change in plate motion at the end of the Cretaceous. The finite element modelling of this proposed tectonic evolution will test its validity and predict hydrocarbon generation and migration through time.

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American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Thursday, 24 October 2013, 12:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.

This e-symposium will be introducing signal processing techniques as a means to maximize extracting geomechanical data from petrophysical logs.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)
Online e-Symposium
Thursday, 9 September 2010, 12:00 a.m.–12:00 a.m.

The presentation will focus on hydraulic fracture geometry in shales, the materials used in the fracturing process, and treatment monitoring via microseismic.

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)
DL Abstract

Physics is an essential component of geophysics but there is much that physics cannot know or address. 

Request a visit from John Castagna!

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

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)

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