Kansas Geological Survey, Open File Report 97-14
Compilation of reservoir, field and play studies into a published
petroleum atlas is a time honored approach to illustrating by analog
the latest petroleum exploration and development knowledge and
application. Notable compilations of such studies include:
Structure of Typical American Fields
(Powers, 1929); Giant Fields
of 1968-1978 (Halbouty,
1981); Treatise of Petroleum Geology: Atlas of Oil and Gas
Fields (Beaumont and Foster,
1990; Foster and Beaumont,
1991; 1992), Atlas of
Major Texas Oil Reservoirs
(Galloway and others, 1983),
Atlas of Midcontinent Gas Reservoirs
(Bebout and others, 1993), and
Atlas of Major Rocky Mountain Gas Reservoirs
(Robertson and others, 1993). The
underlying goals of these petroleum atlases have been to:
Various formats have been developed to facilitate data access, and
to meet the requirements and limitations of the particular paper
publication. Table 1 shows a
generalized format that is common to many of these compilations. The
traditional published atlas is a time consuming and expensive process
that results in static paper product. Products and data are typically
limited by space and cost considerations to summary information at
the field or reservoir level. For each play, field or reservoir only
a relatively small number of author-selected maps, cross-sections,
charts and other summary data are included. The paper atlas does not
provide access to well and lease data or to intermediate research
products (such as digital geographic and geologic components of maps,
interpreted and uninterpreted subsurface data, geochemical analyses,
thin section images, and other traditionally unpublished material).
Without access to the data and intermediate products, modifying and
updating a published field study to fit particular applications or
new scientific ideas is a difficult and time consuming process.