Uncovering Influences on the Form of Oil and Gas Field Size Distributions     

Schuenemeyer  John H.  Drew  Lawrence J. 《Natural Resources Research》1999,8(1):37-47

A detailed understanding of the processes that led to empirical oil and gas field size distributions, especially the dynamic character of the discovery process, is needed to improve the quality of forecasts of oil and gas resources. An empirical distribution results from a complex interaction of economic, technical, and social factors with geology in the form of a distribution of deposits. These factors may cause an empirical distribution to mutate nonrandomly through time. Changes in the price of oil, the cost of exploration and development, technology, and access to prospects influence the discovery process. Failure to recognize and account for them in the modeling process can result in serious bias in estimates of the number and volume of future discoveries. In addition, the broad range of some forecasts for a given region may be explained by differences in perspective of those involved in the process. Geologists who understand the basic processes and collect the data may be scientific determinists. Statisticians who model and analyze the data are trained to think in terms of random variables and stochastic processes.  相似文献   

The space-time structure of oil and gas field growth in a complex depositional system     

Lawrence J. Drew  Richard F. Mast  John H. Schuenemeyer 《Natural Resources Research》1994,3(3):169-182

Shortly after the discovery of an oil and gas field, an initial estimate is usually made of the ultimate recovery of the field. With the passage of time, this initial estimate is almost always revised upward. The phenomenon of the growth of the expected ultimate recovery of a field, which is known as field growth, is important to resource assessment analysts for several reasons. First, field growth is the source of a large part of future additions to the inventory of proved reserves of crude oil and natural gas in most petroliferous areas of the world. Second, field growth introduces a large negative bias in the forecast of the future rates of discovery of oil and gas fields made by discovery process models. In this study, the growth in estimated ultimate recovery of oil and gas in fields made up of sandstone reservoirs formed in a complex depositional environment (Frio strand plain exploration play) is examined. The results presented here show how the growth of oil and gas fields is tied directly to the architectural element of the shoreline processes and tectonics that caused the deposition of the individual sand bodies hosting the producible hydrocarbon.  相似文献   

Aggregation of carbon dioxide sequestration storage assessment units     

Madalyn S. Blondes  John H. Schuenemeyer  Ricardo A. Olea  Lawrence J. Drew 《Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment (SERRA)》2013,27(8):1839-1859

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Letters to the editor     

Björn A. Malmgren  John H. Schuenemeyer 《Mathematical Geology》1978,10(1):103-108

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Initial yield to depth relation for water wells drilled into crystalline bedrock--Pinardville quadrangle, New Hampshire     

Drew LJ  Schuenemeyer JH  Armstrong TR  Sutphin DM 《Ground water》2001,39(5):676-684

A model is proposed to explain the statistical relations between the mean initial water well yields from eight time increments from 1984 to 1998 for wells drilled into the crystalline bedrock aquifer system in the Pinardville area of southern New Hampshire and the type of bedrock, mean well depth, and mean well elevation. Statistical analyses show that the mean total yield of drilling increments is positively correlated with mean total well depth and mean well elevation. In addition, the mean total well yield varies with rock type from a minimum of 46.9 L/min (12.4 gpm) in the Damon Pond granite to a maximum of 74.5 L/min (19.7 gpm) in the Permian pegmatite and granite unit. Across the eight drilling increments that comprise 211 wells each, the percentages of very low-yield wells (1.9 L/min [0.5 gpm] or less) and high-yield wells (151.4 L/min [40 gpm] or more) increased, and those of intermediate-yield wells decreased. As housing development progressed during the 1984 to 1998 interval, the mean depth of the wells and their elevations increased, and the mix of percentages of the bedrock types drilled changed markedly. The proposed model uses a feed-forward mechanism to explain the interaction between the increasing mean elevation, mean well depth, and percentages of very low-yielding wells and the mean well yield. The increasing percentages of very low-yielding wells through time and the economics of the housing market may control the system that forces the mean well depths, percentages of high-yield wells, and mean well yields to increase. The reason for the increasing percentages of very low-yield wells is uncertain, but the explanation is believed to involve the complex structural geology and tectonic history of the Pinardville quadrangle.  相似文献   

A Framework for Expert Judgment to Assess Oil and Gas Resources     

Schuenemeyer  John H. 《Natural Resources Research》2002,11(2):97-107

In frontier areas, where well data are sparse, many organizations have used expert judgment to estimate undiscovered resources. In this process, several important issues arise. How should the knowledge be elicited? At what level of aggregation (geologic process model, play, petroleum system, country, etc.) should the assessment be performed? How and at what stage of the assessment process should feedback be given to assessors? Is independent replication of estimates possible? How are issues of dependency treated? When and how should uncertainty be specified? The context for this presentation will be the methodology used in the US Geological Survey's 1998 1002-Arctic National Wildlife Refuge assessment of oil and gas resources.

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Book review     

W. E. Sharp  John H. Schuenemeyer  Robert Ehrlich 《Mathematical Geosciences》1987,19(2):159-159

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A procedure to estimate the parent population of the size of oil and gas fields as revealed by a study of economic truncation     

John H. Schuenemeyer  Lawrence J. Drew 《Mathematical Geosciences》1983,15(1):145-161

An estimation technique has been derived to predict the number of small fields in a geologic play or basin. Historically, many small oil and gas fields went unreported because they were not economical. This led to an underestimation of the number of undiscovered small fields. A study of the distributions of reported oil and gas fields in well-explored areas suggests that the large fields when grouped into log base 2 size classes are geometrically distributed. Further, the number of small fields reported is a function of the cost of exploration and development. Thus, the population field-size distribution is conjectured to be log geometric in form.  相似文献   

Statistical map analysis techniques applied to regional distribution of uranium in stream sediment samples from the southeastern United States for the National Uranium Resource Evaluation Program     

R. J. Howarth  G. S. Koch Jr.  C. Y. Chork  R. H. Carpenter  J. H. Schuenemeyer 《Mathematical Geology》1980,12(4):339-366

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Aggregation Methodology for the Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

John H. Schuenemeyer  Donald L. Gautier 《Mathematical Geosciences》2010,42(5):583-594

This paper presents a methodology that intends to aggregate the results of a recent assessment of undiscovered conventional oil and gas resources of the Arctic by the U.S. Geological Survey. The assessment occurred in 48 geologically defined regions called assessment units. The methodology includes using assessor specified pair-wise correlations as the basis to construct a correlation matrix. Sampling from this matrix generates more realistic uncertainty estimates of aggregated resources than if assumptions of total independence or total dependence are made. The latter two assumptions result in overly narrow or overly broad estimates. Aggregation results for resources in regions north of the Arctic Circle are presented.  相似文献