Regardless of one’s view on global warming or the causes thereof, reality is that at a minimum the world is going to need a lot of hydrocarbon energy for a long time to come during the transition to alternative energy sources and much of this oil and gas energy has yet to be found.  Fortunately, several uniquely green aspects of ADF® can aid and abet this transition. 

A key challenge, if not the key challenge in many geothermal energy development projects is finding sufficient permeability for the project to be commercially viable.  Apex Spectral’s ADF® technology measures bulk volume permeability, which is a combination of intrinsic permeability, Relative Permeability and reservoir thickness.  It follows that ADF® could be applied to geothermal exploration projects to image commercial reservoir permeability from seismic data just like is routinely done now for various oil and gas exploration and production projects worldwide.

Unlike the amplitude technologies of yesterday, due to its sensitivity to Relative Permeability, ADF® exhibits a large time lapse 4D effect.  Therefore, ADF® could be used during carbon sequestration monitoring to ensure that CO2 sequestered in underground reservoirs is not leaking out, which if it were would make CO2 sequestration an expensive and pointless exercise that would actually be increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, because it takes a lot of hydrocarbon energy to compress CO2 and pump it into subsurface reservoirs.