And I've acknowledged that you probably do use those dates, but nevertheless you haven't said anything about how they are necessary, what they actually tell you that you can't find out from relative dating and seismic imaging.
Actually, I did. In so many words, anyway.
Radiometric dates help determine the thermal history of a basin and when/where oil might be generated. If a date is too old, the oil might have already formed and migrated, or the heat from an intrusive might be too old to have affected a source rock.
This kind of information is used as a filter to set priorities for maintaining a land position or when to drill a target.
However, what you say is that all intrusive rocks are of the same age. That really doesn't fly in any kind of exploration.
In some mineral exploration, age dates are critical in determining targets and prioritizing them. Too old or too young in the Rocky Mountains and no one wants to spend money on them.
This is interesting. Finally someone has given an answer to the question about how OE dating helps in finding oil. Unfortunately this may be off topic here, but it would be good to understand more about this. As written it's still rather mystifying to me.
Temperature seems to be the point of the dating, but I'm not sure how that works. If it's the current temperature of the rocks how does dating help establish that? Why couldn't you drop a thermometer down a core pipe to find out? And how would you determine the date of a buried rock in any case? I understand that simply knowing its time period, such as "Carboniferous" would give too broad a range of dates if you are trying to determine a more exact date as the basis for determining temperature.
Anyway I hope this can be discussed further somewhere, if not here.