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A review of the progress for hydrocarbon migration technology: Mainstream methods, frontier trends, and future prospects
Vol 5, Issue 2, 2024
Issue release: 30 December 2024
VIEWS - 70 (Abstract)
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Abstract
Oil and natural gas, as fluid minerals, flow within the Earth’s crust under the influence of various driving forces such as pressure, buoyancy, and gravity. This phenomenon is known as hydrocarbon migration. Hydrocarbon migration is a crucial component of the reservoir formation process, and accurately analyzing its direction affects the precision of trap prediction, well positioning, reservoir size, and morphology evaluation, thereby influencing the difficulty and cost of hydrocarbon development. However, most of the currently discovered hydrocarbon reservoirs have undergone multiple transformations or destructions, increasing the challenges of hydrocarbon development. Through an extensive literature review, this paper summarizes and categorizes the main current methods of studying hydrocarbon migration, including sedimentological methods, geochemical tracers, numerical simulation, and geophysical methods. Furthermore, this paper discusses and explores the frontier trends in hydrocarbon migration, mainly reflected in artificial intelligence (AI) methods, digital oil fields, geological big data analysis, and high-resolution seismic imaging technology. Looking to the future, there are significant opportunities in hydrocarbon migration research in data integration and intelligent analysis, high-resolution detection technology, digitization and automation, and the application of green technologies. However, there are also severe challenges regarding data quality and integration, the complexity and uncertainty of models, environmental and safety concerns, technology costs, and interdisciplinary collaboration. In conclusion, this paper clarifies the hydrocarbon migration process by reviewing, summarizing, and analyzing existing literature to understand hydrocarbon reservoirs’ formation and distribution patterns. It also delves into the mainstream methods, frontier trends, and prospects of hydrocarbon migration technology, providing valuable insights for future research.
Keywords
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Prof. Sivanesan Subramanian
Anna University, India
Prof. Pascal Lorenz
University of Haute Alsace, France
Dortmund University of Technology, Germany.
Interests: Mass spectrometry, Molecular Structural Analysis, Methodology; Application; Biological, Environmental and Food samples.
