Qualifications Microseeps was founded in 1984 to provide surface geochemistry applications to the Oil and Gas Exploration industry. Microseeps was founded by the leadership of the former Gulf Research & Development Company (GR&DC) geochemistry program. Since 1984, Microseeps has expanded its services to include a wide range of exploration and environmental services based on the technology and approaches developed at Gulf Research.
Petroleum Reservoir Monitoring Experience Microseeps has been involved in some of the most sensitive seepage analyses performed in this country over the last two decades including characterization of a leak in a salt dome storage cavern that caused the relocation of the town of Mt Belvieu, Texas and the development of data to design methane mitigation systems to be used in the building of hundreds of houses on 1000 acres over a natural gas field in Playa Vista, California. Microseeps currently monitors a number of salt dome storage facilities across the south and southwest. Prior to forming Microseeps, the principals were responsible for assisting in the exploration of dozens of petroleum fields in the continental US and in the Gulf of Mexico. Records of these explorations are still maintained for future reference. A list of fields and the data available are contained in Section II of this document.
Personnel Dr. Robert J. Pirkle, Microseeps President and CEO, was Director of Geochemistry for GR&DC and directed much of their hands-on sampling and interpretive aspects of the surface geochemistry petroleum exploration program. This program at Gulf encompassed soil gas surveys over existing fields and exploration plays in virtually every petroleum basin in the US and numerous foreign countries. Additionally, Gulf developed the means to survey over the offshore continental shelves where hydrocarbons seeped through the surface sediments into the water column. This technology involved both cores of the seafloor and samples from the water column. With regard to water column samples, Gulf collected 100,000+ data points in the Gulf of Mexico. Following the Gulf Chevron merger, Dr. Pirkle, working at the Houston Advanced Research Center, obtained this data from Chevron and formed a consortium of several oil companies to study this data in terms of its relationship to known and potential petroleum reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico. This data set is still available as are numerous other data sets from land surveys. At Microseeps, Dr. Pirkle has continued to apply the techniques developed at Gulf and has developed a broad array of capabilities that can be applied at Enhanced Oil Recovery or Carbon Sequestration sites.
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Microseeps has now grown into one of the world’s leading providers of analytical and sampling services using soil gas and groundwater geochemistry methods. From its location within the Applied Research Center located in Pittsburgh, PA, Microseeps consults on projects, manages field projects and obtains samples from around the world. 