Exploring for hydrocarbons today is about as far removed as possible from old movie images of wildcat drillers hoping for a gusher. It involves teams of geologists, geophysicists, and petroleum engineers seeking to identify, characterize, and pursue geologic prospects that may contain commercial quantities of oil and gas. Because these prospects lie thousands of feet below the earth's surface, uncertainty and trial-and-error pervade the exploration process. It is a painstaking and hugely expensive enterprise, with low success rates. Historically, new field wildcat exploration has succeeded at a rate of one productive well for every five to 10 wells drilled.

Despite the increased difficulty of discovering remaining domestic resources, technology developments have enable the oil and gas industry to maintain or, in many cases, improve upon, historical levels of exploration success. Today, experts can interpret geological and geophysical data more completely; manage, visualize, and evaluate larger volumes of data simultaneously; and communicate interpretations based on these data more accurately.

Advanced techniques now allow the scientist to virtually "see" the inside of the formation. Three-dimensional seismic technology bounces acoustic or electrical vibrations off subsurface structures, generating massive amounts of data. Then powerful computers manipulate the data to create fully visualized multidimensional representations of the sub-surface. Even more exciting is 4-D time-lapse imaging __ and emerging technology developed only within the past 5 to 10 years -- which adds the dimension of time, allowing scientists to understand how the flow pattern of hydrocarbons changes in the formation over time.

Improvements in 3-D seismic and 4-D time-lapse visualization, remote sensing, and other exploration technology allow explorationists to target higher-quality prospects and to improve success rates by as much as 50 percent or more. The result: fewer wells need to be drilled to find a given target, and production per well is increased, in some cases by 100 percent.

Today, fewer than half as many wells are required to achieve the same reserve additions as two decades ago. Thanks to today's technology, whole new categories of resources, considered inaccessible just 20 years ago, are now counted as part of the domestic resource base. In aggregate, technology improvements have slashed the average cost of finding oil and gas reserves in the United States from roughly $12 to $16 per BOE of reserves added in the 1970's and 1980's to $4 to $8 today.

* Natural gas is converted to "barrels of oil equivalent" on the basis of a 0.178 barrels of oil per thousand cubic feet of gas.

Sharply increased success rates and well productivity improvements attributable to advanced exploration technology yield substantial environmental benefits. Fewer wells drilled means reduced volumes of wastes to be managed, such as cuttings and drilling fluids. Improvements in exploration and production technology enable operators to better tap resources that remain in existing fields. Advances in 3-D and interwell seismic technology allow operators to take another look at older producing areas, such as the fields in Appalachia, California, and Texas, and see untapped zones of hydrocarbons that were bypassed or could not be seen in the past.

Improved computer-processing technology and interpretation software allow older seismic data to be reprocessed and reevaluated. Once untapped zones are identified, new techniques for sidetrack drilling (drilling a lateral extension from an existing wellbore) and deeper drilling from existing wells can allow some of these resources to be developed without drilling new wells or disturbing previously undisturbed areas.

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