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The next 20 years or ‘Will the next elephant be geographical or technical?’

TLE Editorial Board

Corresponding author: sparkman@erch.org

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

This year has been a period of reflection as members of the TLE Editorial Board, prompted by the 20th anniversary of the first issue, have looked back at several key topic over the last generation and how TLE attempted to be a mirror for our industry's technological advancements. In my opinion, TLE's "loose filter review" policy—the cornerstone of our editorial philosophy—has allowed us to chronicle new technology for the SEG membership in a timely manner and fully endorses the work of the Executive Committees who a generation ago decided to go forward with this new publication concept.

This final article in the series will be somewhat different. It will look at the past but the main focus will be: What do we see for the next 20 years? This may seem an impossible prediction to make but I feel that recent history shows how some technologies develop over 20 years and, thus, we can extrapolate some recent innovations into the future with some degree of confidence.

During my career, the phrase "looking for elephants" has been routinely and extensively used to describe the pursuit of large oil and gas reserves. Consequently, I was intrigued by an advertisement in the program for SEG's 2002 Annual Meeting that used the familiar phrase "Looking for Elephants?" to pitch their point that advanced technologies would be the key that interpreters would need to pinpoint elephants in the coming years. This soon caused me to think that giant fields might not be the only elephants that will be discovered. Shouldn't breakthrough technologies also be considered "elephants?"

If we examine some major technology advances that have made our industry a force in exploration and development, we immediately learn that researchers often have had to wait for other technologies to be developed before they could test . . . [Full Text of this Article]