Petroleum

Current research in petroleum includes many different activities. Within companies that explore for and produce petroleum, scientists and engineers try to determine where they should explore for petroleum, how they might recover more petroleum from a given field, and what types of tools can be lowered into wells in order to enhance our understanding of whether or not that individual well might have penetrated an oil or gas field. They also examine more fundamental aspects of how the earth behaves, such as how rocks form and what forms of life have existed at various times in the earth's history. The United States Geological Survey continues to evaluate petroleum reserves and new technology to produce oil and gas. The federal government operates several facilities called Strategic Petroleum Reserves that store large quantities of petroleum for use in times of supply crisis.

Petroleum exploration specialists are using a type of geophysical data known as three-dimensional seismic data to study the structures and rock types below the surface of the earth in order to determine where exploration wells might successfully produce petroleum. Geochemists are assessing the results of studies of the chemistry of the surface of the earth and whether or not these results can improve the predictions of scientists prior to drilling expensive exploratory wells.

Significant recent discoveries of petroleum have been made in many areas of the world: Algeria, Brazil, China, Egypt, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam, among others. In the United States, the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf Coast states, California, and Alaska continue to attract the interest of explorationists.