Publications

Since their initial discovery in the 1960’s, gas hydrates have been considered to be an important potential source of unconventional natural gas. Significant progress has been made relative to our understanding of the geologic and engineering controls on the ultimate energy potential of gas hydrate; however, more work is required to realize the promise of gas hydrates as a future energy source. Ga

Deepwater natural gas hydrate resources potentially exceed all other conventional and non-conventional hydrocarbon resources on a world-wide basis. However, before these offshore gas hydrate resources can be classified as reserves, it must be demonstrated that gas hydrates can be produced under conditions that make economic sense. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the technic

The Southern High Plains (SHP) is a new and emerging U.S. uranium province. Here, uranyl vanadates form deposits in Pliocene to Pleistocene sandstone, dolomite, and limestone. Fifteen calcrete uranium occurrences are identified; two of these, the Buzzard Draw and Sulfur Springs Draw deposits, have combined in-place resources estimated at about 4 million pounds of U3O8. Ore minerals carnotite and f

Hydrocarbon reserves and technically recoverable undiscovered resources in continuous accumulations are present in Upper Ordovician strata in the Appalachian Basin Province. The province includes parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. The Upper Ordovician strata are part of the previously defined Utica-Lower Paleozoic To

The Arctic Alaska basin occupies the eastern part of the Arctic Alaska – Chukotka microplate, which rifted from the Canadian Arctic margin during opening of the Canada Basin. Stratigraphy comprises four tectonostratigraphic sequences. (1) The Devonian and older Franklinian sequence consists of sedimentary and metasedimentary rocks deposited on the Arctic passive margin of Laurentia and in a Devoni

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is preparing a national resource assessment of the potential hydrocarbons recoverable after injection of carbon dioxide (CO2) into conventional oil reservoirs in the United States. The implementation of CO2-enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) techniques can increase hydrocarbon production, and lead to incidental retention of CO2 in reservoir pore space allowing long-t

Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated undiscovered, technically recoverable mean resources of 1.2 billion barrels of tight oil and 29.1 trillion cubic feet of tight gas in Mesozoic formations in the Sichuan Basin of China.

Solid organic matter (OM) in sedimentary rocks produces petroleum and solid bitumen when it undergoes thermal maturation. The solid OM is a ‘geomacromolecule’, usually representing a mixture of various organisms with distinct biogenic origins, and can have high heterogeneity in composition. Programmed pyrolysis is a common method to reveal bulk geochemical characteristics of the dominant OM, while

Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated undiscovered, technically recoverable mean resources of 2.6 billion barrels of oil and 123.9 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Tindouf Basin Province of North Africa.

The Upper Cretaceous Eagle Ford Group displays significant lateral and vertical geochemical variability. Much of the work on the Eagle Ford Group has been focused southwest of the San Marcos arch. To more fully characterize the Eagle Ford across the entire region, a thermally immature drill core was acquired north of the San Marcos arch that recovered the Pepper Shale and the Eagle Ford Group. Mol

A self-organizing map (SOM) is a non-linear projection of a D-dimensional data set, where the distance among observations is approximately preserved on to a lower dimensional space. The SOM arranges multivariate data based on their similarity to each other by allowing pattern recognition leading to easier interpretation of higher dimensional data. The SOM algorithm allows for selection of differen

The Vilkitskii Basin is a separate petroleum province that lies beneath the continental shelf of the East Siberian Sea east of the New Siberian Islands and northwest of Wrangel Island. It is a basin known only on the basis of gravity data and three seismic profiles. A small, southern part of the basin overlies the Brooks Range–Chukotka late Mesozoic-early Paleogene orogenic belt, but most of the b