PANGAEA GEOCHEMICAL TECHNOLOGIES

Company History

     In 1995, Environmental Compliance Consulting, Inc., a Kansas firm engaged in various environmental projects ranging from Phase 1 and 2 studies to remediation of contaminated soils, created two operational divisions.   One division, Environmental Probing Services, continued to perform investigations relating to contaminated soil and groundwater through sample acquisition and mobile laboratory services.

     The second division, Pangaea Geochemical Technologies was formed to develop, perfect, field test and ultimately market the Pangaea Gas-Sieve method of exploration for oil and gas based on a chemical analysis of soil vapor to predict where hydrocarbon filled reservoir quality rocks occur in the subsurface.

     A U.S. Patent was granted in July of 1999 to Pangaea for the Gas-Sieve method of exploration.    
 

History of Direct Methods Geochemistry

      Pangaea’s gas-sieve method of exploration was based on a concept that was developed by the Russian and Germans in the 1920’s.  The early work attempted to monopolize on the concept that oil & gas reservoirs leak trace concentrations of light hydrocarbon components of crude oil & gas and given time they migrate to the surface collecting in the voids of soils near the surface, finally discharging to the atmosphere. The analysis of soil vapor for light hydrocarbons is considered a direct detection surface geochemistry method.  An indirect method of surface geochemistry would rely on the detection of a secondary feature of the migrating hydrocarbon such as soil mineral alteration.

     The light components emanating from a reservoir are methane, ethane, propane and iso-butane and butane. The early researchers sampled and analyzed soil vapor for these hydrocarbons.  The difficulties that were nearly impossible to overcome in the 1920’s related to first generation analytical equipment and problems of supporting any technology in the field.  Even with these roadblocks, many successful field discoveries were attributed to these early attempts at using surface geochemistry.

     Later, major U.S. companies brought these concept to the U.S. and used it internally, obtaining patents and holding the methods proprietary.  In the mid 1980’s with the crash of oil prices, most major companies dismantled all in-house research, and released all specialty staff and methods. Most of these patents had reached term at about the same time. Once this happened, geochemistry began to appear in the market place.  Some of the problems then were the under-funded status of the new companies and sustained low oil prices, which resulted in the demise of many efforts.

     In the 1980’s the environmental industry was energetically funded and the result was a dramatic improvement in analytical equipment and techniques.  Pangaea, whose parent company was intimately involved in environmental methods development, brought these new chemistry methods to the geochemical industry. The results was the application of gas-sieve technology to soil vapor geochemistry.  Pangaea has effectively demonstrated how this method overcomes the analytical problems that continued to plague “old science”  geochemistry into the 1990’s.

   In the 1990's soil vapor geochemistry was expanded to include C1-C18 data from soil vapor samples.  This advancement allows the development of a very sophisticated geochemical fingerprint of a microseep and expands the usefulness of survey data.  Sampling for this data can be "active" or "passive".  Active sampling requires an interval of minutes while passive methods take weeks.