Petroleum Exploration Risk Reduction Using New Geoscience Technology

Abstract

As economics of the oil and gas industry become more restrictive, the need for new means of improving exploration risks and reducing expenses is becoming more acute. Partnerships between industry and academia are making significant improvements in four general areas: Seismic acquisition, reservoir characterization, quantitative structural modeling, and geochemical inversion. In marine seismic acquisition the vertical cable concept utilizes hydrophones suspended at fixed locations vertically within the water column by buoys. There are numerous advantages of vertical cable technology over conventional 3-D seismic acquisition. In a related methodology, ‘Borehole Seismic,’ seismic energy is passed between wells and valuable information on reservoir geometry, porosity, lithology, and oil saturation is extracted from the P-wave and S-wave data. In association with seismic methods of determining the external geometry and the internal properties of a reservoir, 3-dimensional sedimentation-simulation models, based on physical, hydrologic, erosional and transport processes, are being utilized for stratigraphic analysis. In addition, powerful, 1-D, coupled reaction-transport models are being used to simulate diagenesis processes in reservoir rocks. At the regional scale, the bridging of quantitative structural concepts with seismic interpretation has lead to breakthroughs in structural analysis, particularly in complex terrains. Such analyses are becoming more accurate and cost effective when tied to highly advanced, remote-sensing, multi-spectral data acquisition and image processing technology. Emerging technology in petroleum geochemistry enables geoscientists to infer the character, age, maturity, identity and location of source rocks from crude oil characteristics (‘Geochemical Inversion’) and to better estimate hydrocarbon-supply volumetrics, which can be invaluable in understanding petroleum systems and in reducing exploration risks and associated expenses.