What's new in exploration
Rank exploration: Hilcorp was granted US BOEM permission [August 2019] to shoot new-generation seismic in the Cook Inlet of Alaska. Rank, not exploration, but effective redevelopment: Hilcorp receives benefit from a $190-million-dollar Dept. of Energy grant to NRG/Petra Nova, to produce oil in a CO2 flood/sequestration project at Hilcorp’s mature West Ranch oil field. [https://www.aiche.org/chenected/2017/01/worlds-largest-carbon-capture-project-launches-texas.]
It seems that after NRG secured the $190 million of DOE money, NRG bought 50% of West Ranch from Hilcorp. NRG decided that instead of just capturing the CO2 and selling it to a third party, the company would build and own the CO2 delivery pipeline. Then it purchased a 50% stake in the West Ranch oil field owned by Texas-based Hilcorp (https://www.nrg.com/case-studies/petra-nova.html). How do the rest of us get access to government money? Simple, use enviro-dither to capitalize efforts in achieving your EUR projections. Maybe a win-win.
The government is still holding auctions for exploration [e.g. BLM in Wyoming], open to anyone with desire, tech and, of course, money. Same for Ghana, the North Sea, South Africa, Senegal, Barents Sea, Angola, Newfoundland, maybe Brazil, and always, the Gulf of Mexico.
Politics. The “Green New Deal, v4” is not the biggest threat to oil exploration or humanity. History and biology show us that war and disease—as in the 1919 flu pandemic—lack of water, and limited food have killed off civilizations rather quickly. The ever-changing planet remains the largest threat to lifeforms—not asteroids, but maybe super-volcanoes. We are still waiting on the last remnants of the retreat of the Pleistocene-Holocene-Glacial Periods, i.e. the currently observed global climate change. The climate trend will cycle. Assuming the Green Deal (GD) folks get their way, sometime in the future, lack of oil production will probably not kill us, however some GD people will get very, very cold. The positive side of no oil? The art of conversation might return, since no one will be traveling far or often.
2019 SEG highlights. The up-topic headlines from the presentations at the SEG San Antonio convention [https://seg.org/Annual-Meeting-2019] are: Anisotropy, AVO and Seismic Inversion, Borehole Geophysics, Distributed Acoustic Sensing, EM Exploration and Reservoir Surveillance, Full Waveform Inversion, Gravity and Magnetics, Induced Seismicity, Interpretation, Machine Learning and Data Analytics for E&P, Mining, Multicomponent Seismic, Near Surface, Passive Seismic, Reservoir Characterization, Rock Physics, Seismic Modeling, Seismic Processing: Emerging Technologies, Seismic Processing: Migration, Seismic Processing: Multiples, Noise, and Regularization, Seismic Theory, Seismic Velocity Estimation, Special Global Session, Special Session, Time Lapse, and lastly, Vertical Seismic Profile [VSP] advancements.
I think VSP remains the orphan child of the industry. Developed first by the Russians, really, and perfected in the U.S., it quickly became a science tool in the 1970s for multi-component recording.
Problem. No one knew then [and today] what to do with those vectors. The different wave field orientations could be recorded, but no processing algorithms existed to put them into geo-reality. Combined with rig time, the cost was up there. Frustrated geos reduced the tool to a mere “check shot.” Actually, shooting more zones with the check shot tool could produce a conventional VSP. But few understood or bothered.
Today, with exploration defined as development, there is a lot more one can do with VSP well technology. In fact, given the ability to access shots radially at great distances around a well, 3D VSP is less expensive than say, a conventional surface seismic effort in that Indonesian rain forest. Better? Absolutely. Most VSP tools now can provide 2X more resolution than surface data. At least one that I am aware of has proven 4x in the field, 10 x in the lab.
More useful? Given quarter-wavelength resolution [fiction on a singe trace] of about 25 vertical ft on surface data, the 3D VSP can produce 4 vertical ft resolution, and possibly 2 ft! Fresnel says the lateral will be reduced similarly. That is 400 ft from surface reduced to 200, maybe 120 ft. Higher resolution is a reservoir engineer’s dream for hydrodynamic models. 3D VSP even has value in the shale business, Fig. 1. Observe.
Next month, I will report on SEG topic attendance. Signal processing will be popular with service firms. Interpretation and machine learning will be attended by a handful of oil company reps at the show, along with consultants. SEG has evolved into an “inner sanctum” for geophysicists to share tech developments and guess at future trends. That is not a complaint, more like watching “the last of the Mohicans.” Oil, as in geologists, engineers and investors, does not attend anymore. That group now goes to EAEG, CSEG, NAPE, URTeC and SPE, nix AAPG and never AGU. WO
