Paramaribo, Suriname, 23 – 26 June
9th EAGE Conference on Conjugate Margins
Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, 27 – 31 July
Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, 27 – 31 July
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Oil & Gas
Frac hit – how does it work?
“Let’s start at a situation where we are drilling a 10,000 ft horizontal well in a prospective but yet undrilled shale play,” Jessica Fallon starts her explanation, “and we frac the shale along the full horizontal length of the well.…
Japex’ hopes to prove commercial gas offshore Japan down following completion of exploration well in Hidaka Trough
Japex completed an offshore exploration campaign in the Hidaka Trough last week, a tectonically active foreland basin in the north of Japan. The well, drilled at a water depth of 1,900 m, has however failed to find commercial volumes of…
Serendipity maximisation
“When people make a creaming curve for a basin,” says Ian Longley from GIS-Pax, “they draw a line, and say that’s going to be the future for the basin.” “The problem with that methodology is, when you predict to find,…
The Supermajors are scaling up, are you?
In the noughties and 10s, wildcat exploration, the fierce frontline of the E&P sector, was characterised by small ambitious pioneers, testing new plays in large basins, with the large caps and majors usually playing the role of “fast followers” when…
Mexico – what’s happening
One of the best ways to learn how an industry is doing is to talk to people when you are actually around. That’s what happened to me in February, when I was in Mexico for a week. Through the conversations…
New oil in an old field
Whilst attending a webinar the other day, Andrew Latham from WoodMac presented an overview of the largest discoveries of 2025. The number one discovery, with an estimated volume of 2 billion barrels, turned out to be the East Baghdad find…
On the Horizon
Energy Transition
Subsurface Storage
The subsurface is a key factor in explaining the poor result of the recent Danish CCS tender
Denmark is one of the countries that aims to be a leader when it comes to climate change mitigation measures. That’s why the government launched a tender process in October 2024 for businesses to apply for a juicy pot of…
Carbon capture and mineralisation pilots in the Middle East
44.01 named their company after the mass of the molecule that is central to their business: Carbon Dioxide. They use CO2 captured from industry or the atmosphere and dissolve it in water to create a carbonated injection fluid, a kind…
Diverting the flow: The hidden power of overburden barriers
Since Mark Lakos joined Rock Flow Dynamics (RFD) from Wintershall Dea a bit more than a year ago – a job that brought him to Russia and Egypt – he has been heavily involved with modelling of CO2 injection and migration…
Geothermal
No B without A
In oil and gas, production is influenced by market demand, but it remains relatively decoupled from end-use consumption – you produce hydrocarbons, sell them, and the relationship between producer and consumer is largely transactional. In geothermal, however, the situation is…
Cape Station and the case of the missing reserves report
In a press release dated June 10 2025, Fervo Energy announced a reserves report by DeGolyer & MacNaughton (D&M), which they say confirms that the Cape Station project can support over 5 Gigawatts of development. The next day, D&M issued…
The low productivity of enhanced geothermal systems
Fervo Energy operate the world’s most well-funded Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) project at Cape Station, Utah, and have published well test results from which the Productivity Index can be estimated. This analysis for Cape Station shows that this key productivity…
Seabed Minerals
Japan retrieves rare-earth-rich mud from 6,000 m in deep-sea’s first
Japan has successfully retrieved sediment containing rare earth elements (REE) from the seabed off Minami-Torishima Island in the Pacific Ocean, some 1,900 km south-east of Tokyo. At nearly 6,000 m below the sea surface, the mission marked the world’s first…
The benefits of being a second mover
“I was in oil and gas for most of my career,” says James Deckelman, the CEO of Deep Sea Minerals, when we meet online. “And the opportunities I have had in that sector are amazing. But when I was approached…
First seabed copper from Norway
Over the past three years, academia and industry joined forces in the project EMINENT to increase knowledge of the deep sea and demonstrate a full value chain for sustainable extraction of seabed minerals. Now the results are on the table,…
New Gas
Deep hydrogen in Lorraine: An appraisal well or a science project?
Following the discovery in 2023 of hydrogen in Folschviller-1A, a coalbed methane test-well analysed by La Française de l’Energie (FDE), Lorraine’s hydrogen potential made headlines again in March this year with the drilling by FDE of a dedicated and much…
A helium prospect without a trap
After the initial hype of helium exploration in the Rukwa basin in Tanzania, things went quiet for 18 months. This is partially because Helium One’s exploration permit expired, and they had to apply and wait for a mining licence for…
Until now, hydrogen exploration wells were drilled half-blind
There is often an element of coincidence associated with how companies form. That also applies to how Viacheslav Zgonnik and Jonathan Allard from French tech start-up HyReveal came together two years ago. While Viacheslav was drilling the first dedicated hydrogen…
Exploration Opportunities
A Cenomanian- Turonian source rock adventure in the Pelotas Basin
After the Aptian source lying on top of the early-drift oceanic crust, the second most important source rock in the South Atlantic is the Cenomanian-Turonian (CT) sequence, a pelagic organic-rich mud ubiquitously deposited in a global anoxic event. Seismic velocity inversion of 3D seismic data in the Pelotas Basin reveals a nuance to the CT-driven play, interpreted to be partly
reworked by contourites. The hunt for tools to chase this phenomenon is on…
AI-driven integration for deeper subsurface insights
Artificial intelligence is transforming geoscience, enabling unprecedented improvements in seismic interpretation, reservoir characterization, and multi-disciplinary data integration. Traditional subsurface workflows – often slow, siloed, and constrained by manual interpretation – are being reshaped by foundation models, multi-modal learning, physics-informed neural networks, and agent-driven automation.
Recent breakthroughs in seismic foundation models (SFMs), multi-modal geoscience transformers, and generative AI have demonstrated substantial gains in speed, accuracy, and generalization across surveys. These advances mark the beginning of a new era in earth modelling: One that promises holistic, continuously updating digital twins of the subsurface.
More on Exploration Opportunities
World of foldouts
From the Industry
Moveout democratises data transformation
UK-based Moveout Data has spent more than a decade addressing this problem as a service provider. Now, the company is taking a different approach: Releasing its in-house data transformation platform, Metaseis, to the wider market. The move reflects broader changes…
Hybrid terrain, unified technology – GT’s land‑nodal system for high‑quality transition zone seismic data acquisition
For sixty years, Geofizyka Toruń (GT) has built its reputation by pushing technological boundaries and exploring the most challenging environments in the field of global seismic acquisition. Since its earliest years, GT has consistently faced and managed operational challenges in…
UH EAS Professional Master’s Programs: World-Class Petroleum Geoscience Education, Built Around Your Career
The University of Houston’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences offers two fully accredited professional degrees: a Master of Science in Geology with Specialization in Petroleum Geology, and a Master of Science in Geophysics with Specialization in Petroleum Geophysics. Conferred…
Subsurface
In the news
Ideas over barrels
When France launched the slogan «On n’a pas de pétrole, mais on a des idées» during the oil shock, it wasn’t clever copy – it was national reframing. Lacking domestic crude became a spark for ingenuity: Efficiency drives, speed limits,…
Subsurface noise #8
THE REALITY BEHIND FLASHY JOB TITLES I recently spoke with someone who works for a large international operator. To me, as a representative of a very small company, the job titles these people have always sounded very impressive. Exploration manager,…
Subsurface noise #7
CORING MUDSTONES A wellsite geologist told me the other day that he was on one of the major oil platforms in the North Sea some years ago, drilling yet another development well. To his surprise, the operator had chosen to…
Geology & Geophysics
The rebellious proto-Riedel shear zones
Classic Riedel shears are the first subsidiary fractures that form prior to breakthrough of a master fault. They appear as low-angle (~15°) en echelon arrays oriented synthetically to the principal displacement zone (PDZ), sharing the same sense of slip. This…
Mid Atlantic ocean floor at outcrop
The island of Maio, Cabo Verde, 600 km the west of Senegal, is the only place where Cretaceous mid-ocean floor of the distal Mauritania – Senegal – Guinea Bissau – Conakry (MSGBC) Basin is exposed, providing a unique opportunity to study…
What else is hiding in your reservoir brine?
For more than a century, petroleum exploration has focused on hydrocarbons. Yet, sooner or later, every producing oil and gas field also brings something else to the surface: Formation water. Vast volumes of saline fluids accompany hydrocarbon production, typically treated…
Portraits
“Running a company is like having a long-term relationship – you have to give and take, but always carry on”
“Moscow was a dark place near the end of the 1980s. Literally, dark. It was hard to find a bar to have a drink,” remembers Vasilii Shelkov when we start our conversation about his early years as a physics student…
The story behind Mexico’s biggest discovery in decades
What does it take to make the biggest discovery a country has seen in decades? How do you do that as a newcomer? You do that because you see things coming. Because you are prepared. Because you did the groundwork…
What words mean
Do we both have the same concept in mind when we talk about a 3D model? “No,” says Katya Casey, “surely not.” That notion shaped her career and the style in which she works. “It is important to be sure…
Technology
If automation and AI are progressing in the way they are, we surely need fewer geologists – not more
Andy Conway from the North Sea Transition Authority started his keynote speech at last week’s Operations Geology Conference – themed “Evolution” – with a nice anecdote. He reminisced about presenting a log correlation he had produced for management from a…
Why shouldn’t all nodes be the same?
“The nodes we produced until this point were tailored to fully autonomous recording,” says Tom O’Toole from STRYDE when we met up for a conversation. “You put them in the ground, leave them to record and retrieve them when the…
Turning the tide
There is a big difference between conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon production when it comes to water production. When drilling a well in a new conventional oil or gas field, the perforations in the well are always placed in such a…
Stories on Camera
Coring assembly
During our second visit to Reservoir Group’s coring warehouse and workshop in Aberdeenshire, Steve Rait – Coring Manager Europe – explained the key elements of the assembly and how they work together during the coring process. In this part, we…
Coring process step by step
We often talk about core being the only ground-truth data from the subsurface, but how is core cut from a well at kilometres depth? With many geologists being stuck to a desk these days, we thought it would be good…
How new seismic and old core have shed new light on the Zechstein play along the Mid North Sea High
As part of the Aberdeen Energy Talk series, PhD student Thomas Houghton from Aberdeen University discusses his work on the Mid North Sea High area of the UK offshore. Using the latest high-spec 3D seismic data acquired in recent years…
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