The Norwegian Barents Sea has been the venue for a continuous campaign of exploration and…
Sponsors
Oil & Gas
Making small pools work
Despite there still being major uncertainties for operators on the UK Continental Shelf, as Niall…
Business can only get better
In anticipation of the tax changes announced by the UK government in October 2024, corporate…
Drilling around mud diapirs
Mud diapirs have long been enigmatic structures in the subsurface. With older seismic data being…
Why the term “fault block” is a useless way to describe a trap
In most prospective basins, the simpler and larger anticlines and high-side fault blocks have mostly…
Fresh water in deep-marine sandstones – how come?
“A famous example of anchoring is finding a high resistivity anomaly on a structure in…
Energy Transition
Carbon Capture & Storage
Creating a source rock and storing it for good
“We started as a project when Swiss supermarket concern Migros wanted to find a solution…
The benefits of being an oil veteran when assessing depleted fields for carbon storage
“ In some ways, knowing the reservoir storage capacity of a CCS project is even…
CCS – a roller coaster ride from an oil crisis to a climate change solution
Initially, at the time of the 1970s oil crisis, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) was…
Geothermal
Coring a geothermal reservoir in oil and gas heartlands
Lower Saxony, the German state that finds itself in the north-western part of the country,…
Bacterial life is everywhere in the subsurface
Elsemiek Croese. Photography: Elsemiek Croese private archive. “Let’s put it this way,” says Elsemiek Croese…
Not-so-hot volcanic rocks in Saudi Arabia
This in what a team of researchers concluded in a paper published in the journal…
Seabed Minerals
A new seabed minerals frontier emerges
American Samoa is emerging as a new potential frontier for seabed minerals, joining global players…
The world’s largest SMS deposits
The terrain along the ultra-slow-spreading Mohns Ridge in the Norwegian Sea is continuously renewing itself…
How spreading rates determine your exploration strategy
Mapped sediment thicknesses at two segments along the Mohns Ridge. Sediment thickness serves as an…
New Gas
Estimates of trapped hydrogen globally – a reality check
Over the last few years, there has been a continuous stream of news coverage on…
HyTerra hits hydrogen – but will it be like a soda going flat?
Natural hydrogen exploration is currently a hot topic, but few companies have advanced from initial…
Hydrogen exploration potential in Uruguay
Uruguay has completed the first phase of its energy transition; most electricity is now generated…
Exploration Opportunities
Discover more in Møre, Norway
As demonstrated by recent exploration success, Viridien’s Northern Viking Graben (NVG) seismic survey in the Northern North Sea has already proven to be a valuable exploration tool. Thanks to the high-quality seismic data in this geologically challenging area, prospects are better defined, allowing for qualified drill decisions. In 2024, Viridien applied the latest seismic acquisition and imaging technology to add a northern extension, known as NVG24 (green polygon in Figures 2 and 3), to its current coverage over the NVG so that it now extends into the Møre Basin and Møre Platform in the Norwegian Sea. A glimpse of the early fast-track data from NVG24 is shown in the foldout juxtaposed with fully imaged data from the NVG East- West (EW) coverage (Figures 2 and 3). The upcoming NVG24 final data will be of the same high quality and reveal structural and stratigraphic details at the Manet Ridge, Marulk Basin, Gnausen High and the Møre Platform (Figure 3).
Geological understanding based on new data is required to unlock potential in the Vøring Basin
Highlights:
- New high-quality seismic and FWI velocity attributes to identify petroleum plays and prospects
- Refinement of sedimentary systems and sand deposits in regions with complex geology
- Identification and mapping of deep-water Paleogene source-to-sink sedimentary systems
- New understanding of volcanic basin processes and deposits
- Interaction between volcanic rocks / sill intrusions and sediments
- Maturation and focused migration of hydrocarbons from deeper structures to shallow reservoirs in hydrothermal vent complexes (HTVC)
- Tie to industry and scientific boreholes and seabed sampling locations
From data to discovery: Applying AI in offshore geoscience
The North Sea continues to rank among the most prolific hydrocarbon regions globally, with abundant remaining re¬sources in both barrels of oil equivalent and carbon capture and storage (CCS) potential. In this comprehensive study, we leveraged advanced AI workflows to interpret multiple seismic surveys and utilize a vast dataset of well informa¬tion to unlock new opportunities for ex¬ploration and development.
Focusing on a large area of the UK and Norwegian continental shelf, the anal¬ysis covered nearly 5,000 wells, 643 of which are Norwegian exploration wells, encompassing around 70 unique data types. Additionally, the dataset included 2,924 UK development wells and a range of UK exploration wells. This project used the ESA EarthNET platform to ingest, process, and inter¬pret the data over six months. What follows is a walkthrough of our full workflow - from raw data ingestion to final geological deliverables - demon¬strating how EarthNET supports rapid, scalable interpretation in data-dense offshore regions.
The EarthNET Data Lake is a platform for managing, contextualizing, and exploring subsurface data across the entire exploration and development workflow. Directly connecting EarthNET modules enables a seamless tran¬sition from raw data to actionable insight. As shown in Figure 1c, the Data Lake acts as the central hub of EarthNET’s integrated, AI-powered subsurface ecosystem.
EARTHNET WORKFLOW
More on Exploration Opportunities
World of foldouts
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Portraits
From scratch
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Turning adversity into opportunity
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Technology
The bit boy has gone
The Canadian oil sector has changed dramatically in a matter of 20 years. Back in…
The well listeners
Karol Jewuła. “ I recently gave a talk in Kuala Lumpur,” says geologist and pore…
How AI helps democratize seismic interpretation
“The times of gurus telling younger staff how to plough through a seismic volume and…
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