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Tight Gas Applications
A break through technology is revolutionizing tight sand production. By making the economics of large gas in place low drainage area plays attractive this technology is currently opening up areas that were currently uneconomic and allowing for a tremendous amount of tight sand infill drilling in older but inefficiently drained plays. Tier personnel have considerable tight sand experience and are actively applying this technology and searching for additional potential areas where it can be applied. Before this technology is widely understood there is a window of time to gain land positions.
Magnetic Survey For Oil and Gas Exploration
Tier Hydrocarbon Exploration has several proposed prospect plays for testing a new technology, which measures the zone of magnetic alteration from hydrocarbon reservoir to the surface of the earth. Tier has a method of eliminating the often times overwhelming basement rock influence thereby extracting information directly attributable to hydrocarbon reservoirs. For the first time, subtle changes in rock magnetics due to hydrocarbon microseepage can then be detected. The juxtaposition of shallow sedimentary magnetic anomalies with basement related contacts and associated structures indicated by total field magnetics and other geological or geophysical data would provide a powerful indicator of undiscovered-trapped hydrocarbons.
In a conventional aeromagnetic survey the crystalline magnetic basement is by far the dominant signal detected. We feel that the conventional component of the aeromagnetic data to be collected can be extremely valuable in finding basement zones of weakness. These areas consistently define oil and gas production trends because they influence both structure and deposition (reef growth, shoaling, and channel diversion) over time.
Many authors, including extensive work at the University of Oklahoma, have investigated the relationship between hydrocarbon migration and rock and soil magnetization. Most reservoirs are found to leak and a variety of magnetic and geochemical change results in the soil and in the subsurface as a result of the interaction of the hydrocarbons, microbes, and iron and other minerals. The magnetic intensity of the sediments is relatively small and cannot be effectively separated from the basement signal in conventional aeromagnetics. Utilization of filtering and or other processing techniques has been unsuccessful due to the non-unique nature of magnetic data. As an example, measured from the surface a broad shallow magnetic source has the same signature as a narrow intense source at greater depth. Tier has for over seven years studied the relationship between soil magnetic susceptibility and hydrocarbon microseepage and has attempted to derive signatures of these anomalies from conventional aeromagnetic data. Although some intriguing results were obtained, especially from derived horizontal gradients, the signal to noise ratio was too low and the quality of the initial data sets was inadequate to measure the small sedimentary anomalies.
In theory, and as confirmed by pilot field testing these problems can be overcome by applying an elegant and largely ignored data collection and processing paradigm. In practice we hope to achieve the ability to measure the magnetic changes in both the sedimentary column and the soils due to hydrocarbon microseepage while retaining the advantages of and utilizing the conventional component of easily collected and processed aeromagnetic data. This technique will identify a fairway of interest for exploration and potentially highlight specific areas of microseepage along that fairway, a powerful combination.