Soil Surveys: ABSTRACT

Abstract

Attention was called to the important role that visual oil and gas seeps and mineralization phenomena have played in the location of oil and gas fields throughout the world. A. Beeby Thompson was quoted in part from his End_Page 1874------------------------------ paper entitled Economic Value of Surface Petroleum Manifestations, which appeared in the Proceedings of the World Petroleum Congress in 1933, as follows. An attempt is made in this short paper to show that surface indications of oil are a natural and essential phenomenon connected with oilfields rather than an unusual circumstance, and further that failure to discern such manifestations is either damaging to prospects or a reflection upon our present-day knowledge of detecting signs of the past escape of hydrocarbons. With the exception of some of the oilfields of the Eastern Mid-continental and Rocky Mountain States of U.S.A., practically all the great oilfields of the world were marked by oil and gas issues near the crests of anticlines or the apices of domes. George Sawtelle, in a paper entitled Salt-Dome Statistics in the A.A.P.G. Bulletin of 1936, pointed out that of the 141 salt domes discovered in the Gulf Coast prior to 1936, 75 owed their discovery, in part at least, to the presence of oil or gas seeps or mineralization phenomena. This is a surprisingly large percentage in view of the crude methods of detecting such evidences. Only large gas seeps generally occurring under water could be detected and mineralization measurements depended on the chance location of water wells. The soil survey method is merely an extension of these older methods in that it makes possible the quantitative measurement of invisible seeps and mineralization phenomena. Furthermore, such measurements may be made at predetermined locations. Data showing soil surveys in South Texas, West Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma were shown. Some interesting theoretical deductions arrived at from the data of soil analysis were dwelt on briefly. End_of_Article - Last_Page 1875------------