An Overview of Data Mining Applications in Oil and Gas Exploration: Structural Geology and Reservoir Property-Issues

TL;DR

This paper reviews how data mining techniques are applied to structural geology and reservoir property issues in oil and gas exploration, aiming to bridge the understanding between data scientists and geoscientists.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of data mining applications in geoscientific problems related to oil and gas exploration, highlighting specific methods and challenges.

Findings

Data mining enhances analysis of geological structures.

Reservoir property issues benefit from advanced data techniques.

The review fosters interdisciplinary understanding.

Abstract

Low oil prices have motivated energy executives to look into cost reduction in their supply chains more seriously. To this end, a new technology that is experimentally considered in hydrocarbon exploration is data mining. There are two major categories of geoscientific problems in which data mining is applied: structural geology and reservoir property-issues. This research overviews these categories by considering a variety of interesting works in each of them. The result is an understanding of the specific geoscientific problems studied in the literature, along with the relative data mining methods. This way, this work tries to lay the ground for a mutual understanding on oil and gas exploration between the data miners and the geoscientists.