Geoscience from Superbasins to Shale Sweetpots

By Informatics @ EGI in News

January 17th, 2021Print Article

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Dr. Rasoul Sorkhabi Interviewed in AAPG Explorer

The January and December 2020 issues of the AAPG Explorer published featured interviews with EGI Research Professor Rasoul Sorkhabi. In the January issue as part of a feature article entitled “Basin and Superbasin,” by Heather Saucier, Sorkhabi remarks that “there are 1,050 giant and supergiant fields in the world. From those, 470 are located in the Middle East and in the former Soviet Union. However, there is super basin potential everywhere if you add shale.” In the December article entitled “Oil Tech Research Goes Beyond Just Big Data,” by author David Brown. Sorkhabi comments on the coming energy transition, saying “The 2020 pandemic has affected every facet of the petroleum industry and has set in motion several long-standing trends in the petroleum industry.

These trends will push the existing science and technologies in new directions, and the petroleum industry will have to evolve to meet the challenges and incorporate new technologies…and will compel many petroleum companies to invest in new technologies, not only wind and solar power, but also critical minerals that can be extracted from sedimentary basins and can support the energy industry.”

Noting that geoscience will be key as the oil industry increasingly looks toward an “energy-mineral nexus” as well as cost-reduction in shale operations and production, Dr. Sorkhabi observed that “geology, geochemistry and petrophysics and critical to locating shale sweetspots, … and for financial reasons, the shale oil industry will have to go beyond merely continuous drilling and fracturing, and incorporate geoscience-based workflows.”

Dr. Sorkhabi also has a newly available Short Course which offers an integrated platform to understand how various disciplines of geoscience, from direct studies of rock formations at microscopic scale to geophysical survey of subsurface basins, are put together in a value chain that helps the industry to reduce its risks and costs of finding and producing hydrocarbons: “Petroleum Geoscience for Engineers” available as a one-day intensive course or an extended three-day deep dive.

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