The United States is at a point of technical convergence and is poised to enter into a prolonged oil and gas drilling boom that could add an astounding 50 to 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent to the ONSHORE US reserve base.

Where are these “mythic” future reserves located? In large part, the resource lies in either conventional stratigraphic traps or in basin-centered reservoirs, which are beginning to look more plentiful than we first imagined. Interestingly, each reservoir type exhibits wildly different sensitivities to commodity price and different elastic behaviors to technology application. As large as that potential reserve number seems, the source is none other than the United States Geological Survey, and it is further defined to lie within undiscovered fields with 1 million barrels of oil equivalent or larger.

What core technologies are contributing to the convergence? Depending on the target, either induced fracturing, horizontal drilling, rock properties-focused seismic methods or a combination thereof will hold the key. Each has exhibited moderate to spectacular results on a stand-alone basis. The Barnett Shale play owes its existence to the right frac type as determined by dozens of failed and sub-optimum experiments. Its current size is due to integrating experiments with horizontal drilling and staged fracking in the horizontal legs. Linking these two technologies have opened up a big play. Operators today are taking what they have learned in the Barnett and seeing if it works in other genetically similar plays.

What happens if we add to that the remote identification of hydrocarbon saturation and flow potential? Depending upon the major rock property factors controlling production from such reservoirs, seismically-derived information is becoming able, in more and more cases, to “close the loop” by allowing explorationists/ exploitationists to invert seismic 3-D volumes to such economically-meaningful

Figure 1. Transforming Wildcatting to Resource Harvesting.

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volumes as “risked producible volume by well spacing unit.” In other words, what the bankers and financiers really need and what they thought they were getting with 3-D zap maps in the early to mid-1990s.

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