A Short History of Electrical Techniques in Petroleum Exploration

The utilization of electrical techniques in oil and gas exploration has always been a subject of great interest to geophysicists, largely because of the hope that the application of such techniques would eventually lead to the direct detection of hydrocarbons through their insulating properties. However, 60 years of constant and at times frenzied debate over direct detection has failed to produce clear evidence of success, and wildly unrealistic claims by competitive service companies have done much to discredit the use of all electrical methods in petroleum exploration. Apparently, this was a problem from the very start. Even as early as the 1930s, while the seismic reflection method was evolving from infancy to a dominant role in the oil patch, electrical prospecting was still mired in an abyss of ignorance about the very fundamentals of electromagnetic theory. Peters and Bardeen (1932) commented: