GEOL 115: The Earth’s Energy Resources

Natural gas comprises largely methane. It can be thermogenic in origin; meaning that it is produced by the same processes that produce oil. Organic matter is exposed to heat and methyl groups break off the larger organic molecules while combining with hydrogen to form methane. Natural gas can also have a biogenic […]

Every President since Nixon has sought the holy grail of U.S. energy independence.  Some have stated this goal more explicitly than others.  Implicit in this goal is the suggestion that the declining US production trend can be reversed. The Hubbert analysis suggests that it can’t, at least for conventional petroleum resources. In this lecture we […]

Little thought had been given to the finite nature of domestic oil supplies prior to the 1970’s. The domestic oil industry was viewed as an industry that required protection from cheap foreign imports. Thus, prior to 1971, the Texas Railroad Commission limited the production from oilfields in the State of Texas and from […]

This lecture was about formation evaluation. Formation evaluation is that set of techniques that is used to determine whether a well can produce oil or gas at commercial rates. Formation evaluation includes mud logging, geophysical logging, and well testing. Mud logging is the process of examining and recording the material that is […]

Hydrocarbon exploration still boils down to drilling. The primary drilling device used in the oil industry is the rotary drilling rig. This piece of equipment is so essential to the energy industry that the number of rotary rigs in operation is monitored continuously and the results are followed with great interest. By considering […]

It’s worth looking a little more closely at the Winner’s Curse. The term Winner’s Curse describes the phenomenon that the winner of an item in an auction is usually the individual that has most egregiously overvalued the item. Although the best examples are sealed bid auctions (apparently the term was coined to describe […]

The search for energy resources is a world-wide effort. We therefore took a moment to consider the different types of energy companies that are involved in this process. There are state-owned oil companies that limit their exploration and production activities to a single country and that bear sole responsibility for all exploration and […]

Today we also started to look at exploration techniques in earnest. Using geologists in the field is cheap. In the early days of the oil business geologists could do surface geology to find oil fields directly. This ranged from simply drilling on oil seeps (the Jed Clampett technique) (here’s an old paper on […]

We started this class by looking at some plate tectonic reconstructions. THere are a number of these on the web that you can look at and one of the better ones is here.
We then talked about clastic reservoirs. Let us first define the term clastic.
clastic- a term used to describe rocks composed of […]

In this lecture we learned about reservoirs.  Reservoirs are the rocks from which we retrieve petroleum and natural gas. The term reservoir is based on economics and rock properties; different rocks can surrender oil and gas at different rates but a rock is a reservoir only if you can make an economic oil well by […]