Permian Basin — subsurface mapping experience.

Overview

The Permian Basin is the most productive petroleum basin in the United States and, by cumulative production, one of the most productive on Earth. It spans roughly 250,000 km² across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico and remains the driver of US unconventional production in the 2020s and beyond.

The basin's geology is unusually layered. Multiple stacked producing benches — the Wolfcamp (A, B, C, and D), Bone Spring, Spraberry (Upper and Lower), Avalon, and Atoka — all coexist within 6,000–12,000 feet of total vertical depth. For horizontal-well operators, the economic question is rarely "is there oil here?" — it's "which bench on which bench-foot, and at what landing point?" Sweet-spot heterogeneity within any single bench routinely varies 3× in EUR per lateral foot across distances of 1,500–5,000 feet.

Remote NMR subsurface mapping has been deployed in the Permian for both pre-drill sweet-spot ranking in undrilled portions of large acreage positions and bypassed-pay targeting in legacy producing areas where decades of drilling have left undrained rock between existing wells.

Mapping considerations

From a mapping standpoint, the Permian presents a target-rich but interpretively complex environment:

• Stacked prospectivity. Multiple producing benches within a single vertical column — operators routinely decide which bench to land in first based on which benches have the strongest saturation indication.
• Well calibration is excellent. With hundreds of thousands of wells drilled across the basin, regional calibration against historic log data is straightforward. This tightens confidence scores on new remote surveys substantially.
• Surface activity is intense. Infrastructure, roads, and active operations create signal clutter in the upper spectral bands that must be masked out during processing.

Typical use cases in this basin

• Sweet-spot mapping in undrilled portions of large acreage positions
• Bench ranking in stacked-pay areas
• Bypassed-pay targeting in legacy producing sub-basins
• Pre-acquisition diligence on bolt-on M&A
• Tier-1 vs Tier-2 acreage classification for capital allocation