Nikolai Kudryavtsev

He led reconnaissance exploration research in Georgia, and compiled the program of key exploration wells in the West Siberia in 1947 that paved the way to the new era of oil and gas production in Russia that started with first gas gusher near Berezovo in 1953.

He gave many examples of substantial and sometimes commercial quantities of petroleum being found in crystalline or metamorphic basements, or in sediments directly overlying those.

The Lost Soldier Field in Wyoming has oil pools, he stated, at every horizon of the geological section, from the Cambrian sandstone overlying the basement to the upper Cretaceous deposits.

Kudryavtsev concluded that commercial accumulations are simply found where permeable zones are overlaid by impermeable ones.

Kudryavtsev introduced a number of other relevant observations into the argument about the theory of abiogenic petroleum origin.