The term “petroleum” originates from the combination of two medieval Latin words petra meaning “rock” and oleum meaning “oil”. The search for petroleum or hydrocarbon pre-dates modern civilisation predicated by ancient Sumeria. The Sumerians would use a sticky black liquid called bitumen or asphalt to attach flint arrowheads to shafts for hunting. This liquid would become the first petroleum product ever used by the human race (Bilkadi, 1984). Uses of hydrocarbon were limited up until the 1850’s when the distillation of kerosene from artificially produced petroleum resulted in cheaper and superior method to illuminate candles and lamps and eventually replaced whale and rosin oil (Fleming, 1967). The birth of the gasoline powered combustion engines in the 1880’s heralded the start of the petroleum revolution, a world economy based on a cheap high density energy source which brought with it prosperity and an insatiable desire for petroleum products.
With the controversial peak oil crisis looming and the number of world class discoveries decreasing, the demand for oil and gas never been so great (Hall and Day, 2009). With large, easy to produce fields diminishing, exploration companies have to remain on the technological cutting edge to discover new oil and gas fields both in on-land and deeper marine environments. The increased drilling costs and exploration risk has brought new challenges for detecting hydrocarbon in deep water settings. Transition into deep water settings has forced geoscientists to be more certain of the presence and position of hydrocarbon especially in deep water settings where the costs to drill exploratory wells can reach in excess of 100 million dollars (Kulkarni, 2005). Since the 1920’s seismic methods have traditionally detected acoustic properties to reduce exploration risk, however with increasing costs, new geophysical methods must be employed to detect density, magnetic and electrical rock properties to be certain of future discoveries (Coraggio et al., 2012; Yang et al., 2011 and Jain et al., 2008). The 21st century obviously brings with it unique challenges, but with new energy technologies, improved hydrocarbon remote sensing techniques and unconventional hydrocarbon sources the threat of peak oil can be overcome.
References
Coraggio, F., P. Bernardelli, and G. Gabbriellini (2012). Structural reconstruction using potential field data in hydrocarbon exploration, pp. 1–6.
Hall, C. A. and J. W. Day (2009). Revisiting the limits to growth after peak oil in the 1970s a rising world population and the finite resources available to support it were hot topics. interest faded—but it’s time to take another look. American Scientist 97 (3), 230–237.
Jain, M., S. N. Mohanty, and S. V. Yalamanchili (2008). Gravity, magnetic and seismic data integration for structural configuration and its hydrocarbon evaluation in the San Juan-Tumaco Basins, offshore Colombia, pp. 774–778. (Rao).
Kulkarni, P. (2005). Lower tertiary play: Is it gulf of mexico’s final frontier?
Yang, H., Y. Zhang, B. Wen, S. Yu, X. Qi, D. Ma, and Z. Xu (2011). Exploring shallow biogenic gas with high-precision gravity data, pp. 892–896.
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