Patent ID: 7980327

Claim:
A method for determining an optimal drilling site for recovery of crude oil contained in a fluid reservoir within a formation layer at a given subsurface depth of at least five hundred feet relative to a terrain surface, the method comprising: a) from multiple positions on or below the terrain surface, transmitting immediately in the far field a sequence of pulsed electromagnetic energy beam signals focused at a select target depth, wherein the signals combine to cover a target area of the select target depth, defining a scan; b) receiving reflections from the target area in response to the sequence of transmitted pulsed energy beam signals impinging thereon, the reflections being characteristic of particular media located within the target area being impinged upon by the transmitted far field pulsed electromagnetic energy beam signals; c) correlating the received reflections from said target area over a given time interval for a given scan to determine relative changes in intensities of reflections over said target area; d) storing the scan data for each scan in memory; modifying transmit parameters in at least one of frequency, focus depth, and phase shift and repeating steps a)-d) for a plurality of selected target depths to thereby define a scanned volume; identifying particular media and their location within the scanned volume according to the scan data, wherein the identifying includes identifying the location of crude oil within the scanned volume relative to other of the particular media; and drilling a borehole from the terrain surface into a reservoir containing the crude oil along a path based on said identification of said particular media within the reservoir.