This Month's Explorer Articles

Big sustainable development goals have mostly flopped so far. Will they do any better in the future? How the world tries to reach sustainability really does matter. It helps determine the operating environment for companies and industries, including the energy industry. It affects the working and living environment of people around the globe. And to date, it’s been something of a train wreck. In 2015, the United Nations adopted a list of 17 “Sustainable Development Goals,” all aimed at fulfillment by 2030. They haven’t gone well.

Best-selling author of a number of geology books, and one of 2024’s AAPG Geoscience in the Media Award winners, Dale Leckie has some advice for anyone interested in writing a book about the oil and gas industry. For those whose task is to get the message out about the oil and gas industry, one obstacle to overcome is the baked-in perception of the audience, both in terms of the misconception of the ecological damage caused by the industry, but perhaps more importantly, the lack of knowledge about the economic benefits that are directly related to the industry's efforts.

When Juli Hennings, this year’s AAPG’s Geosciences in Media Award winner, thinks about all the factors that brought her to this moment in her professional life, there are two that stand out. The first was in Texas at a meeting at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences. Her husband heard Scott Tinker express his desire to bring a greater understanding of the planet to more listeners and viewers. When her husband relayed this to her, the bells went off. “EarthDate” had taken shape.

Despite the many large gas discoveries in the Levant Basin in the Eastern Mediterranean, not much has been disclosed about its offshore sequence stratigraphy, mainly because of the proprietary nature of industrial data. Noble Energy (now owned by Chevron) played a large role in the discoveries of the Tamar, Leviathan and other sizeable gas fields. Andrew Madof, a senior geologist at Chevron, recently shared a rare offshore stratigraphic framework of the southern Levant Basin. Building on previously unpublished geological and geophysical data, he offered new ideas about the basin’s Oligo-Miocene deepwater sands.

Today’s energy sector leaders face multiple competing challenges – meeting ever-increasing energy demand while ensuring energy security, along with satisfying shareholder and government commitments to reduce emissions. The challenge is particularly evident in regions like Latin America and the Caribbean, which is expected to increase in population by 22 percent by 2050. Executives from the region’s principal operators will discuss competing priorities at the AAPG Energy Summit, a business conference targeted to decisionmakers taking place this month in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

The energy transition is affected by many factors, including natural and financial resources, infrastructure, technology, political will and public policy. These topics shape the agenda at the 2024 AAPG Latin America and Caribbean Energy Summit, an event convening decisionmakers tasked with developing strategies to meet energy demand while guaranteeing energy sovereignty and lowering emissions. The topics are familiar to Carlos Garibaldi, executive secretary of the Association of Oil, Gas and Renewable Energy Companies Latin America and the Caribbean (Arpel). He noted that Arpel members share concerns and a sense of urgency in addressing energy transition solutions. While the region is making great strides to diversify energy sources, both progress and solutions vary widely by country.

A century of production in Oklahoma has created new accommodation space in the subsurface as well as an extensive pipeline infrastructure on the surface. Additionally, a vast array of industrial sources ready to be retrofitted with capture technologies and the state’s industry-friendly attitude toward the energy industry uniquely position Oklahomans to benefit from existing tax incentives and the emerging carbon credit market. Here, we present an overview of Oklahoma’s CO2 storage potential.

This past July, the EXPLORER published a brief commentary by Lee Gerhard called “Going Quietly into the Night?” That commentary struck a note with several AAPG members … but not in a good way. Keep in mind that the EXPLORER is not a peer-reviewed journal. It is a news magazine designed to elicit thought, speculation and inquisitiveness from the membership. It is not the job of the editor to fact-check an opinion piece. After the article, several letters to the editor were printed in response to objections by some members. Their requests were honored and printed. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy everyone.

Tangguh is the liquefied natural gas production and export hub for multiple gas fields discovered during the 1990s in eastern Indonesia by Atlantic Richfield Indonesia Inc., a subsidiary of ARCO. The name “Tangguh,” meaning “resilient” in Bahasa Indonesian, was chosen by Indonesia’s then-President Suharto in late 1997. Tangguh turned out to be far more enduring than Suharto’s reign, as 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of ARII’s drill and test of the discovery well, Wiriagar Deep-1.

A big change has been announced for an AAPG Foundation program that for nearly 30 years has made a big impact on geoscience education. Shifting educational priorities and an intent to generate relevant support for geoscience students have led to creation of the new AAPG Foundation Field Camp Scholarship program, which will be used specifically to fund field camp participation. The initiative will replace the Foundation’s L. Austin Weeks Undergraduate Grant program, which was created in 1997 after Foundation Trustees received a $1 million gift from Weeks.

A dominant topic at CERAWeek this year was how expansion of data centers – the bricks-and-mortar installations that house the computing “cloud” we use daily – drives significant increases in electricity demand. Artificial intelligence technologies deployed through the cloud today, and those in development for tomorrow, hold great promise for transforming the global economy. But a factoid repeated frequently at the conference was that a conventional internet search uses a measure of energy, and an AI-assisted search uses 10 times that amount.

In his 1874 science fiction, “The Mysterious Island,” Jules Verne suggested that one day, hydrogen extracted from water would replace depleting fossil fuels. Since then, hydrogen has been considered the “energy of the future.” As petroleum geoscientists, we might be tempted to formulate hydrogen systems in terms of what is most familiar to us – petroleum system components and processes – but hydrogen systems require a different lens and distinct components.

BP is reportedly refocusing toward oil and gas. Current CEO Murray Auchincloss will allegedly update BP’s strategy in February 2025 to remove the target of reducing its oil and gas production by 25 percent by 2030.  BP’s strategic shift is the latest example of a European major reverting back to its core business. The top five leading European international oil companies – Shell, TotalEnergies, BP, Equinor and ENI – have turned back toward oil and gas to varying degrees, moving away from earlier energy transition targets.

The current boom of technological advancements in the oil and gas industry is not the first of its kind. We can look back at the dot-com era, advancements in digitization and more to see that the tradeoff for improved operations is usually lost jobs. Increased efficiency means less work, which means downsizing and shifts in the roles remaining. Let’s look back on some key historic events to see if we can better prepare ourselves to navigate the waters (often rapids!) of change that might lie ahead and are endemic to our industry.

Taiwan is the youngest island formed by tectonic activity, formed when the Eurasian Plate subducted beneath the Philippine Sea plate roughly four or five million years ago. The collision created many orogenic mountains and conditions many believe are well suited to geothermal energy. Now, the island is a food mecca (home to several Michelin-recommended restaurants and the only street food that made the Michelin guide) and geological tourism haven. Spend a few days in Taiwan’s capital city before venturing out to its national parks and geothermal areas.