Petroleum – Oil and Natural Gas
New Exploration Methods for Oil and Gas
In the unrelenting search for more oil and gas, innovation plays an unquestionable role. As large oil and gas fields become increasingly difficult to find, geologists, geophysicists and engineers employ new technologies, such as seismic, to uncover resources that just 10 years ago were unimaginable. Seismic is a technology that bounces sound waves off rock formations deep below the surface of the Earth to provide explorers with a picture of the subsurface, often revealing locations where oil and gas may be trapped. The technology of finding oil has even incorporated 3D visualization tools from Microsoft’s Xbox game console! The system will help geoscientists examine and interact with 3D models of the Earth.
In order to process the massive amounts of information collected from seismic surveys, mathematicians, physicists and other scientists are constantly developing new computer algorithms to find complex patterns that enhance our understanding of the land beneath us. If we are to continue finding new fields hidden deep inside the Earth, breakthroughs in computer processing power and data management are necessary.
How Do We Get to the Oil?
The oil and natural gas we use today have been trapped deep inside the Earth for millions of years. Although it is tempting to think of oil and gas reservoirs as large pools and wells with giant straws that suck the fluid to the surface, oil and gas is actually locked inside the rocks like water in a sponge. Just like the small holes in a sponge that collect and hold water, there are tiny spaces or pores in rocks that fill with oil and gas. For the past 100 years, oil and gas was extracted from rocks with small pores that were still big enough that the fluids flowed easily. If you were a tiny molecule of oil, flowing through these rocks would be like driving on a highway in the express lane. During this time period, geologists and engineers knew about other large quantities of hydrocarbons trapped in rocks with even smaller and more complex pores, but were unable to harness the resource—the oil and gas flowed too slowly or not at all from these rocks. Instead of driving on a large and fast highway, flowing through these rocks would be like driving on a small two-lane road with many stoplights and intersections. Conventional gas wells drilled into these formations were considered uneconomic since the gas locked in the rock would flow out of the tiny pores in the rock at such low rates. This picture changed, and changed in a big way, with the advent of stimulated horizontal wells.
