Grand Challenges for Earth Resources Engineering
Authors: Arscott R. Lyn , Fairhurst Charles , Lake Larry 
Published: February 2015

R&D Grand Challenges - During 2010, the SPE Research and Development (R&D) Committee developed a list of some of the great challenges facing the oil and gas industry. The committee prioritized these needs and called them the ’R&D Grand Challenges’: increasing recovery factors, in-situ molecular manipulation, carbon capture and sequestration, produced water management, higher resolution subsurface imaging of hydrocarbons, and the environment. These ’grand challenges’ incorporate as much as possible enabling technologies (e.g., drilling performance can improve recovery) as well as address the technical disciplines within the SPE organization - Drilling and Completions; Facilities and Construction; Reservoir Description and Dynamics; Production and Operations; Health, Safety, and the Environment; and Management and Information. It is the intent of the SPE R&D Committee to articulate and promote the benefits of R&D in the upstream oil and gas industry so this third series of invited guest JPT articles was begun in May 2011. These have been published every two or three months with two remaining articles to appear. The R&D Grand Challenges Series, comprising articles published in JPT during 2011 and 2012, is available as a collection on OnePetro (SPE-163061-JPT).

A recent report by the US National Academy of Engineering (Grand Challenges for Engineering, NAE 2008) identified 14 grand challenges covering the broad range of engineering disciplines that await engineering solutions and that, when accomplished, will make significant improvements to the broad realms of human concern: sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living. Two of those challenges are in Earth resources engineering: developing carbon sequestration methods and providing clean water. Many other engineering challenges fall into the category of Earth resources engineering so a task force composed of members of the academy’s Earth Resources Section identified four challenges that were the most critical.

They are:

Make the Earth transparent.

Understand, engineer, and control subsurface coupled processes.

Minimize the environmental footprint.

Protect people.

The primary objective of Earth resources engineering is to apply engineering principles to the discovery, development, and environmentally responsible production of subsurface Earth resources. The traditional engineering disciplines for this objective are mining engineering, mineral processing engineering, petroleum engineering, and geological engineering. However, other science and engineering disciplines contribute critical expertise, particularly geophysics and hydrogeology. The skills needed to explore and produce resources from the Earth are also important in the study of earthquakes, the subsurface flow of groundwater, the storage of wastes such as carbon dioxide or nuclear wastes, and the design of subsurface structures for human habitat or subsurface infrastructure such as electrical cables or pipelines.

Make the Earth Transparent

That the solid Earth is opaque is a major obstacle in all aspects of Earth resources engineering. The challenge for subsurface engineering is similar to the imaging problem in medicine. We need tools that will allow us to see into the subsurface just as medical tools allow doctors to see into the human body.

Geological structures range from the microscopic grains and crystals of the rock matrix and associated pore spaces to the topography of a basin. This range spans nanometers to kilometers, or 12 factors of 10. To complicate matters further, geological properties are mostly anisotropic (vary with direction) and heterogeneous (vary in space). Because of the scale effect, many methods and tools are required to characterize geological structures. On the largest scale (1–10 km spatial resolution), airborne gravity, magnetic and electromagnetic imaging, and satellite-based synthetic aperture radar measurements are used. On the scale of 10–100 m, seismic waves are used, either actively generated by explosive charges or mechanical vibrators or naturally generated by distant earthquakes or ocean waves. On a smaller scale of centimeters to 1 m, a variety of well logging tools that use electromagnetic, nuclear, and gamma ray technology exist.