2025 Eastern Section AAPG Meeting and Observations

       The American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) is a great organization for geoscientists with some nice benefits. During industry downturns and COVID, they lowered membership prices, for which I am personally grateful. The AAPG Academy hosts many very interesting free webinars on a variety of geological topics. 

     Although I ended up letting go of my membership due to my own budget, I was able to get to the latest Eastern Section meeting in Columbus. Ohio, which was the first in several years. Oil & gas geologists have certainly been shrinking in importance in the industry. First, there was the move to unconventional drilling, which pointed geologists in different directions. The horizontal shale plays still need geologists, but are heavier on engineers. Then, there were the multiple industry downturns. Now, it is an increase in efficiency that makes less drilling and fewer wells able to capture more resources. I found out that the Appalachian Geological Society, founded in 1931, has been more or less shuttered for good. I used to attend meetings, usually in Charleston, WV, but sometimes in other cities like Huntington, WV, Morgantown, WV, or Marietta, Ohio. One problem was that attendance at meetings dwindled to just a few people, and the speakers invited to talk didn’t have much of an audience. The Ohio Geological Society is still having meetings, though attendance is likely down for those as well. The last one I went to was in 2023.

     The lower-priced meeting was attended by about 75 people, many from state geological surveys from Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Past Eastern Section meetings were attended by several hundred people and lasted three days. This was before and during the boom in unconventional horizontal drilling. The oil & gas industry has definitely contracted, particularly the geological part of it. Many geologists moved on to other careers.

     I was going to do a review of the talks, but I didn’t take good notes, so I thought I would just write about some of them and the character of the meeting. Unfortunately, I missed Randy Blood’s talk about the Kelwasser Upper Devonian mass extinction event, which he has traced in different outcrops around the world. I follow his interesting work on LinkedIn.

     There were talks on the potential effects of iron in formation fluids on the underground storage of hydrogen and a few different talks and poster sessions about carbon sequestration evaluation, some from geoscientists at Battelle, one of the world’s largest science R&D companies, based in Columbus, Ohio. Comparison of oil & gas reservoirs and carbon sequestration reservoirs, typically the deep saline formations, was a theme. Another talk was on automated mineralogy, and indeed, AI was present in several talks, including the use of AI in seismic processing and attribute analysis. There were other talks on lithium exploration, identification of hydrocarbon gases and noble gases to understand geochemistry of petroleum systems, facies analysis, the study of paleo bio-events, and geothermal possibilities in Eastern West Virginia in an area with volcanic intrusions. Thus, many of the talks were about hydrogen, CCS, geothermal, and geological events, rather than oil & gas exploration and development.  

     There were a lot of smart people in the room, smart geologists, knowledgeable of many aspects of geology, which is a really vast science. Good questions were asked and answered. It was nice to see what some of the Ph.D.’s are up to. There were a few prospectors around as well, which was nice. Hopefully, the Eastern Section and the local geological societies will continue to be important and relevant. There is still a need to understand the subsurface economic and greenhouse gas mitigation possibilities.