March 2007 Editor's Letter

This Month
by Bill Rizer
This month you will want to check out Daniel Tearpock’s presentation on ethics in petroleum geoscience at the joint HGS and GSH Luncheon at the Petroleum Club on March 28. Current efforts to develop standardized definitions and procedures for reserves estimation are among the topics to be discussed. This presentation satisfies the one-hour ethics obligation required for all Texas Professional Geologists. Also scheduled is an interesting presentation at the HGS General Dinner on March 12 by Michelle Judson on imaging below salt in the deepwater GOM and below layered anhydrites in the Nile Delta. New technology in the form of wide-azimuth acquisition, ocean bottom seismic and multi-azimuth surveys was required to image these difficult and geologically complex targets.
Also this month, Art Berman will give a presentation at the SIPES Luncheon at the Petroleum Club on March 15. "New Ideas and Their Diffusion: A Model for Exploration & Production Companies in the 21st Century" strives to explain the way that new ideas propagate and how the proper understanding and use of the Diffusion Model along with proper risk assessment can lead to economic success by using new ideas to be early into new plays. W. Keith Campbell will give a presentation at the International Dinner Meeting on March 19 on how detailed 3D seismic coupled with core and image log data was used to better define the complex reservoir geology in the Eocene of the northern part of the Santos mobile salt basin, offshore Brazil. Bruce Hart, McGill University, will give a presentation at the North American Dinner on March 26 on the use of 3D seismic to delineate hydrothermal dolomite reservoirs and some of the structural plays associated with the Trenton-Black River trend. At the Environmental and Engineering Dinner on March 20, John Larson will discuss the global carbon cycle and how greenhouse gasses and carbon inventories will play a dominant role in future economics.
The "In the News" column this month includes a brief discussion of the results of the Summary of the long-awaited Fourth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Six years in the making, the report narrows the uncertainties associated with the conclusions reached in the previous report (2001) and now states that global warming is an unequivocal fact and most of it is caused by human activities. It is important to realize that this is a consensus report, and the statements and conclusions released have been at least accepted as true by all of the delegates. Rumor has it that significant pressure was applied by some countries to water down the wording of the report. Nevertheless, the Summary that was released is chilling enough. For example, the current levels of CO2 (379 ppm in 2005) far exceed the natural range over the last 650,000 years (180 to 300 ppm) determined from analyses of ice cores.