Dry holes!  Who needs them?  What do you do if you’ve drilled one?  How are you going to deal with one and your prospect doesn’t turn out the way you expected?  These are all questions that face every geologist in our industry who is doing any kind of exploration, and they even happen in development scenarios!

First of all, we all need those dry holes (preferably those drilled by someone else)!  They are the data points we all use in our exploration efforts.  Just think of the vast area between producing fields that comprise the area in which we conduct most of our exploration.  About the only source of data in those areas (other than geophysical data) is the dry hole.

The Stephen F. Austin State University Board of Regents met on the SFA campus for a regularly scheduled meeting on Monday, November 2nd.  The Board of Regents had previously requested that Dr. Wesley Brown, head of the Geology Department, review the contributions made to the Department by the East Texas Geological Society.  When the Regents saw the level of support from the ETGS, they asked Dr. Brown to invite members of the Society to the Board of Regents meeting to be recognized for the support we, as a Society, have provided to SFA.

Last year, in November, Josh Rosenfeld spoke to us about the isolation of the Gulf of Mexico from the world’s oceans and the subsequent drawdown of the waters in the Gulf that resulted from that isolation (you can review the slides from his talk on our website).  He based his hypothesis on:
 

• the excavation of deep canyons across contemporary continental shelves and slopes – like the Yoakum, St. Landry, Chicontepec channels,
• the sudden and thick deposition of thick, widespread, high net-sands in the deep Gulf Basin hundreds of kilometers beyond the contemporaneous shelf edge
• salt deposited in the Tertiary Veracruz Basin
• a regional unconformity in the carbonate-dominated eastern Gulf Basin