How oil & gas exploration find those hidden hydrocarbon reservoirs in offshore?

What is it about?

The article present an new technology used to find oil & gas reservoirs in areas having complicated geological structures. The article uses plain very understandable language to explain & illustrate the power of electromagnetic waves, in particular its new use in oil & gas exploration! The article demonstrates, with data examples from North Sea oil & gas fields, the performance of integrating seismic (elastic) waves with the Control Source Electromagnetic waves - an new geophysical data integration technology - adopted by oil & gas industry in present-day exploration!

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Why is it important?

With the depletion of oil and gas reservoirs in existing fields both onshore and offshore, the pursuit of hydrocarbons has driven the industry to move into geologically more complicated areas. As one may expected that the hydrocarbons are stored in certain depths below the earth surface, and are sealed by the surrounding rocks. Exploration geophysicists usually find them by using advanced imaging technology, i.e., similar as medical CT. Because the different response from the hydrocarbons and rock when the elastic wave travelling through them, the oil & gas exploration has been using seismic waves for this purpose for very long time. However, To find oil & gas in those geological complex area, the use of seismic technology is not working very well. After working on this issue for many years, the geoscientists have now found a solution that electromagnetic waves can compensate the disadvantage of the seismic waves, because electromagnetic waves are more sensitive to the hydrocarbons than seismic waves!

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