[p_j_w]

>I do find it inspiring that we can "just" calculate our way out of some important issues.

In the case of oil exploration, we can calculate our way into some!

[seabass-labrax]

Calculate, suffocate, annihilate. The fact that we now need computers to find oil says a lot about how much we've already used up, and the precarious position we find ourselves in as a result.

[auspiv]

Computers have been used in the industry since at least the 1970s. These days, every major oil company has $XXX million in supercomputers cranking through seismic data in a number of extremely computationally intensive ways. Reservoir simulation is also computationally intensive, but can be done at the individual workstation level.

Here's a paper from May 1985 titled "Applications of supercomputers in the petroleum industry" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400.... Found that without even looking for oldest example.