One of the most important areas of oil investment is the exploration. It is also the most expensive as locating an oil and gas reservoir and drilling it entails a lot. It requires the knowledge of the presence of such area and also the techniques for imaging the subsurface before drilling.

Oil drilling investments can be huge as the returns from the investment are also high. The oil drilling process begins by collection and analysis of geologic, production and commercial data on an entire geological basin, a likely place for oil and gas to have collected over millions of years. This can be done through satellite photographs, gravity and magnetic information, plus existing various types of seismic data.