Emil D. Attanasi, Ph.D.

Prices for battery-grade lithium have increased substantially since 2020, which is propelling the search for additional sources of this important element. Battery-grade lithium is predominately recovered from continental brines. Most crude oil and natural gas wells recover briny formation water, which may represent an additional source. Chemical analysis of these waters has been shown to...

Energy producers and utilities use oil and gas reservoirs for gas storage to meet peak seasonal demand or to supplement intermittent energy production. These reservoirs are also suitable for the long-term storage of carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas. This study reports on a reconnaissance analysis of the potential magnitude of storage resources in 9424 known oil and gas reservoirs...

Outside the United States and Canada, most of the world’s supplies of oil and natural gas are recovered from conventional (or discrete) oil and gas accumulations. This type of hydrocarbon accumulation remains a target for exploration. In this report, exploration and discovery data are used to visually assist in describing the exploration maturity of selected petroleum provinces with...

In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed a probabilistic assessment of the volume of technically recoverable oil resources that could be produced using current carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) technologies in amenable conventional oil reservoirs underlying onshore and State-owned offshore waters (herein after, onshore and State waters areas) of the conterminous...

In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed a probabilistic assessment of the volume of technically recoverable oil resources available if current carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) technologies were applied to amenable oil reservoirs underlying the onshore and State waters areas of the conterminous United States. The assessment also includes estimates of the mass of...

IntroductionIn 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed a probabilistic assessment of the volume of technically recoverable oil resources that might be produced by using current carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) technologies in amenable conventional oil reservoirs underlying the onshore and State waters areas of the conterminous United States. The assessment also...

This paper analyzes the relationship between actual reservoir conditions and predicted measures of performance of carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (CO2–EOR) programs. It then shows how CO2–EOR operators might maximize the value of their projects by approaching implementation using a “flexible selective” pattern development strategy, where the CO2–EOR program patterns are selectively...

This entry defines and discusses the random forest machine learning algorithm. The algorithm is used to predict class or quantities for target variables using values of a set of predictor variables. It uses decision trees that are generated from bootstrap sampling of the training data set to create a "forest". The entry discusses the algorithm steps, the interpretative tools of the...

Understanding the geochemistry of waters produced during petroleum extraction is essential to informing the best treatment and reuse options, which can potentially be optimized for a given geologic basin. Here, we used the US Geological Survey’s National Produced Waters Geochemical Database (PWGD) to determine if major ion chemistry could be used to classify accurately a produced water...

The level to which data are aggregated or smoothed can impact analytical and predictive modeling results. This paper discusses findings regarding such impacts on estimating change points in production flow regimes of horizontal hydraulically fractured shale oil wells producing from the middle member of the Bakken Formation. Change points that signal transitions in flow regimes are...

Geologists and petroleum engineers have struggled to identify the mechanisms that drive productivity in horizontal hydraulically fractured oil wells. The machine learning algorithms of Random Forest (RF), gradient boosting trees (GBT) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) were applied to a dataset containing 7311 horizontal hydraulically fractured wells drilled into the middle member...

In recent years, geologists and petroleum engineers have struggled to clearly identify the mechanisms that drive productivity in horizontal, hydraulically-fractured oil wells producing from the middle member of the Bakken formation. This paper fills a gap in the literature by showing how this play’s heterogeneity affects factors that drive well productivity. It is important because...