The Future of Petroleum Geoscience

Petroleum geoscience is geology and geophysics applied to petroleum exploration and production. In this book we will try to show the wide range of disciplines that are relevant and useful for this purpose. Many of the disciplines in the geosciences are highly specialised and there is often too little communication between the different fields. Most researchers naturally focus on a very small area because of the requirements with respect to methods and analytical techniques, and the demands of following the literature. Petroleum geoscience requires a broad overview of substantial parts of geology and geophysics and

provides good training in the integration of very different types of data and models. These skills are also applicable in many types of environmental research and when solving practical environment problems.

The petroleum industry employs a large percentage of the world’s geologists and geophysicists and funds much of the research in this field. Most of the obvious petroleum-bearing structures have already been found in the explored sedimentary basins and there are now rather few areas that have yet to be explored seismically and by drilling. The large, easy-to-find structures did not usually require very advanced methods and geological skills.

More and more sophisticated methods are therefore used in modern exploration. We are on a global basis not finding enough new oil fields oil to replace the produced oil. Global reserves have however not changed very much because of higher estimates of recovery from existing fields and because unconventional oil like tar sand is now included in the reserves. There is a major challenge for geoscientists to develop ever better exploration methods and to optimise production. Even if the global production of conventional oil may be reduced there will be significant production for many decades.

This will mostly come from the tail production of giant fields and from small reservoirs, but it is rather labour intensive. This is also the case with unconventional oil (tar sand and oil shale) and also tight gas reserves and shale gas. Until enough alternative sources of energy are developed it is necessary to extract fossils fuels from these resources. This should be done with as little environmental damage as possible and this requires a new generation of highly skilled geoscientists.