James Van Blaricum
The practice of locating natural gas and petroleum deposits has been transformed dramatically in the last 15 years with the advent of extremely advanced, ingenious technology. In the early days of the industry, the only way of locating underground petroleum and natural gas deposits was to search for surface evidence of these underground formations. Those searching for natural gas deposits were forced to scour the earth, looking for seepages of oil or gas emitted from underground before they had any clue that there were deposits underneath. However, because such a low proportion of petroleum and natural gas deposits actually seep to the surface, this made for a very inefficient and difficult exploration process. As the demand for fossil fuel energy has increased dramatically over the past years, so has the necessity for more accurate methods of locating these deposits.
Sources of Data
Technology has allowed for an incredible increase in the success rate of locating natural gas reservoirs. In this section, it will be outlined how geologists and geophysicists use technology, and knowledge of the properties of underground natural gas deposits, to gather data that can later be interpreted and used to make educated guesses as to where natural gas deposits exist. However, it must be remembered that the process of exploring for natural gas and petroleum deposits is rife with uncertainty and trial-and-error, simply due to the complexity of searching for something that is often thousands of feet below ground.