Quote from: TDoS on Feb 06, 2024, 05:47 PM

Quote from: K-DogConventional was an unnecessary and unused qualification before the  21st century.

Could be true.

I would like to officially answer this question beyond "could be".

It kept me up last night...not my glib attitude about why Joe Average Peak Oiler not knowing anything might lead them to just the easiest thing to remember...but I knew there was a better answer. And there was.

The word "conventional" in the geoscience world only gained meaning, hell only became possible after something else happened FIRST. Otherwise your point applies....no one knew any better and things just WERE. There was no need for "conventional" as a definition because everything was the same, even if resources were being developed in the late 1800's that were this thing NOW called something else, the word for it is usually "unconventional".

The something that came along happened in the mid to late 1980's. Geologists working for the USGS noticed something in their work along the Rocky Mountains, at the time they referred to it as "basin centered gas accumulations". It was weird because it defied petroleum geology principles of buoyancy, gas shouldn't be trapped under formation water, it should have migrated through geologic time and been trapped as a gas cap like in "conventional" reservoirs (now accurately described as "discrete reservoirs"). 

Chuck Spencer and Ben Law worked out the geology and first supposed the idea and words (basin centered gas accumulation), and by 2000 the idea was being used to find, describe and allow people to think about this different type of accumulation. Like here .

USGS literature and results are themselves sprinkled with phrases like "unconventional basin centered gas accumulation" and whatnot, they didn't initially convert over to the new term until more early this century.

And then the words began showing up on their official forms, as to what it was they were evaluating.
Here is Bob's writeup on the method.

The peakers never stopped to ask any geology questions, for them it was bell shaped curves and MZBs and doom and whatnot, and most folks still can't get away from the conventional/uconventional monikers. The words have been replaced of course now, by those who understand these things, the shakeout by around 2010 arrived at "discrete reservoirs" and "continuous accumulations". I think the USGS method for discrete reservoirs never lost the "conventional" title on their forms. In part because I don't think they ever changed their methodology either.

Here is a reference to USGS 2002 resource assessment work sort of mixing and matching the terms, 2nd paragraph under the "Resource Summary" sub-title.

So that is the correct answer. Not "could be", but HAD to be when a new geologic concept cropped up, created something else, rendering all the old stuff "conventional" (meaning old stuff we all think we know what it is because its old and been around awhile) and the new stuff easily became the "unconventional", which stuck and that term is still used, incorrectly, today.

The correct answer is that there are discrete oil and gas accumulations and continuous oil aad gas resources. They have both been hydro shocked and hydraulically fracked since about 1865 when the shock process was invented, and both types of accumulations are improved by either process. Lower quality and deeper rocks in the continuous resource plays came to dominate US oil and gas production starting in the late 1980's in the Antrim Shale of northern Michigan. It was economic only with hydraulic fracturing, and the precursor to what happened next. Whereas early and shallow development of both discrete reservoirs and the same continuous type systems found in the Devonian sections in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virgina easily coughed up plenty of oil, discrete shallow sands and shales turning the Tri-State area into the Middle East of the world back in the 1860-1880's. All with water in the hole and liquid nitroglycerine to have an incompressible fluid to frack the rock.

The Antrim Shale development starting in the late 1980's was the key for the folks watching this stuff, who 15 years later had seen both that, the development of continuous resources in the Rockies, the early Barnett development in the Newark Easy field, the spreading of the Cotton Valley and some Wilcox development throughout the old Carthage field, etc etc. Armed with this history it became quite easy for those who knew this to contradict right from the beginning those who claimed peak oil was the end all be all early in the 21st century.