Practical applications
Exploration for energy and mineral sources
Over the past century, industries have developed rapidly, populations have grown dramatically, and standards of living have improved, resulting in an ever-growing demand for energy and mineral resources. Geologists and geophysicists have led the exploration for fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.) and concentrations of geothermal energy, for which applications have grown in recent years. They also have played a major role in locating deposits of commercially valuable minerals.
Coal
The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries was fueled by coal. Though it has been supplanted by oil and natural gas as the primary source of energy in most modern industrial nations, coal nonetheless remains an important fuel.
The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that only about 2 percent of the world’s minable coal has so far been exploited; known reserves should last for at least 300 to 400 years. Moreover, new coal basins continue to be found, as, for example, the lignite basin discovered in the mid-1980s in Rājasthān in northwestern India.
Coal-exploration geologists have found that coal was formed in two different tectonic settings: (1) swampy marine deltas on stable continental margins, and (2) swampy freshwater lakes in graben (long, narrow troughs between two parallel normal faults) on continental crust. Knowing this and the types of sedimentary rock formations that commonly include coal, geologists can quite readily locate coal-bearing areas. Their main concern, therefore, is the quality of the coal and the thickness of the coal bed or seam. Such information can be derived from samples obtained by drilling into the rock formation in which the coal occurs.
Oil and natural gas
During the last half of the 20th century, the consumption of petroleum products increased sharply. This led to a depletion of many existing oil fields, notably in the United States, and intensive efforts to find new deposits.
Crude oil and natural gas in commercial quantities are generally found in sedimentary rocks along rifted continental margins and in intracontinental basins. Such environments exhibit the particular combination of geologic conditions and rock types and structures conducive to the formation and accumulation of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons. They contain suitable source rocks (organically rich sedimentary rocks such as black shale), reservoir rocks (those of high porosity and permeability capable of holding the oil and gas that migrate into them), and overlying impermeable rocks that prevent the further upward movement of the fluids. These so-called cap rocks form petroleum traps, which may be either structural or stratigraphic depending on whether they were produced by crustal deformation or original sedimentation patterns.
Petroleum geologists concentrate their search for oil deposits in such geologic settings, mapping both the surface and subsurface features of a promising area in great detail. Geologic surface maps show subcropping sedimentary rocks and features associated with structural traps such as ridges formed by anticlines during the early stages of folding and lineations produced by fault ruptures. Maps of this kind may be based on direct observation or may be constructed with photographs taken from aircraft and Earth-orbiting satellites, particularly of terrain in remote areas. Subsurface maps reveal possible hidden underground structures and lateral variations in sedimentary rock bodies that might form a petroleum trap. The presence of such features can be detected by various means, including gravity measurements, seismic methods, and the analysis of borehole samples from exploratory drilling. (For a description of these techniques, see Earth exploration.)
Another method used by petroleum geologists in exploratory areas involves the sampling of surface waters from swamps, streams, or lakes. The water samples are analyzed for traces of hydrocarbons, the presence of which would indicate seepage from a subsurface petroleum trap. This geochemical technique, along with seismic profiling, is often used to search for offshore petroleum accumulations.
Once an oil deposit has actually been located and well drilling is under way, petroleum geologists can determine from core samples the depth and thickness of the reservoir rock as well as its porosity and permeability. Such information enables them to estimate the quantity of the oil present and the ease with which it can be recovered.
Although only about 15 percent of the world’s oil has been exploited, petroleum geologists estimate that at the present rate of demand the supply of recoverable oil will last no more than 100 years. Because of this rapid depletion of conventional oil sources, economic geologists have explored oil shales and tar sands as potential supplementary petroleum resources. Extracting oil from these substances is, however, very expensive and energy-intensive. In addition, the extraction process (mining and chemical treatment) poses environmental challenges, especially in regions where it occurs. Even so, oil shales and tar sands are abundant, and advances in recovery technology may yet make them attractive alternative energy resources.
Geothermal energy
Another alternate energy resource is the heat from the Earth’s interior. The surface expression of this energy is manifested in volcanoes, fumaroles, steam geysers, hot springs, and boiling mud pools. Global heat-flow maps constructed from geophysical data show that the zones of highest heat flow occur along the active plate boundaries. There is, in effect, a close association between geothermal energy sources and volcanically active regions.
A variety of applications have been developed for geothermal energy. For example, public buildings, residential dwellings, and greenhouses in such areas as Reykjavík, Iceland, are heated with water pumped from hot springs and geothermal wells. Hot water from such sources also is used for heating soil to increase crop production (e.g., in Oregon) and for seasoning lumber (e.g., in parts of New Zealand). The most significant application of geothermal energy, however, is the generation of electricity. The first geothermal power station began operation in Larderello, Italy, in the early 1900s. Since then similar facilities have been built in various countries, including Iceland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, and the United States. In most cases turbines are driven with steam separated from superheated water tapped from underground geothermal reservoirs and geysers.