Pushing the boundaries to find petroleum
Focussing
Beginning in the mid 1990’s, the advent of regional or ‘exploration’ 3D, at extraordinarily low unit cost, enabled us to explore offshore in a very precise way; for example, the whole of the Angola Deep Water blocks 15, 16, 17 and 18 – an area of 20,000 sq kms plus – is swathed in such 3D, and this is direct enabler of the high exploration success rates enjoyed by ExxonMobil, Total and BP.
We find ourselves presented with a different problem when exploring onshore. Consider for example East Siberia, an area that we can describe for qualitative purposes as ‘similar in size to western Europe’. How can we focus our efforts in an area of such scale, engaging first 2D and then 3D seismic only when we have a degree of focus that means we can afford to deploy it?
Well, one option would be to repeat the way the Soviets approached exploration in West Siberia (and to some extent East Siberia) and have a vast army of geologists walking the ground, mapping and sampling. Perhaps some 21st Century CEOs would welcome having the command and control options that the Soviets enjoyed but actually this approach belongs to the past!
An alternative is obviously to map and ‘interrogate’ from the air, or more accurately first from space and then from the air. Satellites have been used in oil & gas exploration for a long time and a company like NPA (www.fugro-npa.com) can point to a 30 year track record, acquiring, processing and distributing image data including Landsat. SPOT, IRS, RADARSAT, ERS-1/2, Russian imagery and data from any other optical or radar satellites. A particular exploration theme is natural oil seep detection which complements the visualisation of terrain and geology.
In the last 6 months or so, I have come across a small company called Scotforth (www.scotforth.com ), with its origins in Russian analytical techniques, that offers what they refer to as RSDD-H (Remote Sensing Direct Detection of Hydrocarbons). Satellite imagery is used to detect photo spectral brightness anomalies; these anomalies are said to be indicative of the presence of subsurface hydrocarbons. Their occurrence is related to minor geo-botanical changes in vegetation and geochemical changes in soils or outcrop rocks resulting from micro-seepage or diffusion of hydrocarbons. Proprietary processing algorithms are used to display photo-spectral variances on map-form satellite images; the degree of anomalous response can be used to categorise or ‘rank’ the anomalies.
The Scotforth web-site has some persuasive examples from Kurdistan and Uganda, for example. This technique may have real potential for screening large, unexplored, onshore areas and leads to the next low-cost ‘focussing’ step of acquiring direct geochemical and botanical sample data in sub-areas of possible interest.
After that, the next step is to think about air-borne technologies which I will do in my next blog.
We find ourselves presented with a different problem when exploring onshore. Consider for example East Siberia, an area that we can describe for qualitative purposes as ‘similar in size to western Europe’. How can we focus our efforts in an area of such scale, engaging first 2D and then 3D seismic only when we have a degree of focus that means we can afford to deploy it?
Well, one option would be to repeat the way the Soviets approached exploration in West Siberia (and to some extent East Siberia) and have a vast army of geologists walking the ground, mapping and sampling. Perhaps some 21st Century CEOs would welcome having the command and control options that the Soviets enjoyed but actually this approach belongs to the past!
An alternative is obviously to map and ‘interrogate’ from the air, or more accurately first from space and then from the air. Satellites have been used in oil & gas exploration for a long time and a company like NPA (www.fugro-npa.com) can point to a 30 year track record, acquiring, processing and distributing image data including Landsat. SPOT, IRS, RADARSAT, ERS-1/2, Russian imagery and data from any other optical or radar satellites. A particular exploration theme is natural oil seep detection which complements the visualisation of terrain and geology.
In the last 6 months or so, I have come across a small company called Scotforth (www.scotforth.com ), with its origins in Russian analytical techniques, that offers what they refer to as RSDD-H (Remote Sensing Direct Detection of Hydrocarbons). Satellite imagery is used to detect photo spectral brightness anomalies; these anomalies are said to be indicative of the presence of subsurface hydrocarbons. Their occurrence is related to minor geo-botanical changes in vegetation and geochemical changes in soils or outcrop rocks resulting from micro-seepage or diffusion of hydrocarbons. Proprietary processing algorithms are used to display photo-spectral variances on map-form satellite images; the degree of anomalous response can be used to categorise or ‘rank’ the anomalies.
The Scotforth web-site has some persuasive examples from Kurdistan and Uganda, for example. This technique may have real potential for screening large, unexplored, onshore areas and leads to the next low-cost ‘focussing’ step of acquiring direct geochemical and botanical sample data in sub-areas of possible interest.
After that, the next step is to think about air-borne technologies which I will do in my next blog.
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