The United States Geological Survey (USGS) states:
“While petroleum is trapped in many ways, less than half of the known petroleum in the world occurs in exclusively structural traps, the remaining part is occurring in NST, pure or combined”.
According to Exxon’s official spokesman…
“All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas”.
Shell thinks…
“It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive”.
The big challenge is:
Classic exploration approach is based principally on reflection seismic surveys for identifying geological structures, susceptible for hydrocarbon entrapment and conservation. But reflection seismic could often miss the Non Structural Traps. Reflection seismic defines well the structural traps and also some stratigraphic (a kind of Non Structural) traps, particularly those related to pinch out features and geological unconformities. However, lithological traps as channels and others, including some types of stratigraphic traps are difficult or impossible to reveal or to define on seismic profiles. This is a big challenge but an advantage and asset of the Marmot IPMT/IPDS technology, the last being able of direct detection of HC accumulation in a porous/fractured reservoir independently whether the trap is structural or not.
Non Structural Traps are occurring everywhere in the world where there are sedimentary basins.
Marmot’s IPMT/IPDS technology is able to discover and detect a hydrocarbon-filled “Reservoir” by its nature and not by its structure.
Prof. Dr. Monzer Makhous, Member of Marmot’s Advisory Board, is stating:
“Today, the panoply of traditional structural traps in many oil provinces in the world is practically exhausted. There is still no choice other than to focus HC exploration on moderate in size but very abundant and spread in sedimentary basins Non Structural Traps. Lasts are particularly spread as stratigraphic, lithologic valley sand channels, lambs, traps issued of sediments differential compaction, traps controlled by diagenetic transformations; and microstructures occurring on the flanges of anticlines and troughs. Research of Non Structural Traps is possible to great extent only by expensive, complicated and detailed geological investigation of the total petroleum system: sedimentological, paleostructural and tectonic history reconstructions with implication of geophysical investigations and many others.
In this respect, the development of Marmot’s IPMT/IPDS and Ultra Low Frequency Passive Seismic Surface Monitoring Technology (ULF PSSM) could be considered as understanding break in hydrocarbon exploration approach and field development. This is due to the remarkable efficiency and high success rate and low cost of the above indicated technology, as well”.