- published: 06 Jun 2014
- views: 14996
Petroleum geology is the study of origin, occurrence, movement, accumulation, and exploration of hydrocarbon fuels. It refers to the specific set of geological disciplines that are applied to the search for hydrocarbons (oil exploration).
Petroleum geology is principally concerned with the evaluation of seven key elements in sedimentary basins:
In general, all these elements must be assessed via a limited 'window' into the subsurface world, provided by one (or possibly more) exploration wells. These wells present only a 1-dimensional segment through the Earth and the skill of inferring 3-dimensional characteristics from them is one of the most fundamental in petroleum geology. Recently, the availability of inexpensive, high quality 3D seismic data (from reflection seismology) and data from various electromagnetic geophysical techniques (such as Magnetotellurics) has greatly aided the accuracy of such interpretation. The following section discusses these elements in brief. For a more in-depth treatise, see the second half of this article below.