Many firms in the oil and gas business have long used decision analysis techniques to evaluate exploration and development opportunities and have looked at recent development in option pricing theory as potentially offering improvements over the decision analysis approach. Unfortunately, it is difficult to discern the benefits of the options approach from the literature on the topic: Most of th...

We present novel techniques for knowledge-assisted annotation and computer-assisted interpretation of seismic data for oil and gas exploration. We describe the existing procedure for oil and gas search which consists of manually extracting information from seismic data and then aggregating it into knowledge in a detail-oriented bottom-up approach. We then point out the weaknesses of this approa...

This paper explores the possibility of developing early warning indicators based on incident investigation. The use of early warning indicators may contribute to ensure that oil companies produce oil and gas without harmful spills. The incident investigated was a hydraulic oil leak from the Eirik Raude drilling rig during exploration drilling in the Barents Sea in April 2005. The incident is an...

The Niger Delta is located in Southern Nigeria and is Africa’s largest delta, covering about 70,000 square kilometers, and with about one-third of it made up of wetlands, and the third largest world mangrove forests. The Niger Delta is unique in Nigeria because it is the home of Nigeria’s oil industry, with its attendant environmental hazards such as water, land, air pollution, etc. Human activ...

Exploration of oil and natural gas from shale deposits can bring to the surface radioactivity. Naturally occurring Uranium-238 and Thorium-232 as part of their decay chains can produce radium isotopes, which are themselves precursors of radon gas. Due to the solubility of radium and its contaminated impact on the environments and health concerns, regulations on the levels of Ra226 and Ra228 in ...

Methane hydrate (MH) is a new energy resource in the 21 century. But the dissociation of MH from sediments during the MH exploration or oil/gas exploration under a hydrate layer accompanied by the softening of soils and formation of excess pore gas pressure may lead to ground failures and environmental disasters. In this study, experiments on modeling the weakening and failure of the sediment b...

many large oil and gas fields in the most productive world regions happen to be fractured. the exploration and development of these reservoirs is a true challenge for many operators. these difficulties are due to uncertainties in geological fracture properties such as aperture, length, connectivity and intensity distribution. to successfully address these challenges, it is paramount to improve ...

buy-back contracts in the upstream oil and gas projects of iran, has experienced the third generation of this kind of contracts since its inception on 1373 (1994) when the oil and gas industry of iran opend its petroleum market to the foreign investment. these contracts have since been subject to the various critieques raised by international oil companies, foreign investors, or petroleum exper...