Africa: Continent of Discoveries
The 11th annual Conference on African E&P, co-hosted by the Houston Geological Society (HGS) and the Petroleum Exploration Society of Great Britain (PESGB), took place on 11–12 September at its new location, the Westin Houston, Memorial City Hotel in Houston. The hotel provided spacious halls, great food, and an unforgettable African dance show for the reception. Over 400 participants attended to explore the latest ideas about plays and prospects, conjugate margins, and emerging technologies in the region.
The conference offered guests an array of presentations, networking opportunities, and vendor displays for exploring the new developments. Discoveries from offshore East Africa and down the entire West coast, which made up 70% of the finds in 2012, created a particularly exciting climate for the gathering. Developments in the technology of sub-salt imaging also served as an engine for ideas and opportunities in finding the plays and prospects for Africa’s future.
The next Conference on African E & P, which will be the 12th in the series, will be hosted in London by PESGB in September 2013, also at a new location to accommodate the growing number of participants. Latest information on attendance, abstract submissions and sponsorship opportunities can be found on the PESGB website.
Source: Jonathan Danforth
Application Ranks Top Performers
URank, an online data application which provides oil and gas industry rankings with ease and rapidity, has recently been launched. Available through any web browser or dedicated application, URank ranks companies, countries and assets by selected benchmarks. URank is the latest product of Norway-based Rystad Energy, internationally best known for their global oil and gas databases, research products and independent consulting services.
URank can rank companies by, for example, production, reserves, exploration success, development activity, production growth and portfolio value. Countries and assets are compared using similar additional benchmarks like tax regimes and discovery size. All lists can be viewed at different geographic levels and with particular focus on main growth areas such as unconventionals and offshore growth.
URank provides historical and current data as well as forecasts derived from annual reports, Rystad Energy’s global database UCube and other company research. The application is therefore based on information of more than 65,000 assets and 3,200 companies with a data time span from 1900 to 2100, capturing a wealth of information with just a couple of clicks.
This application will not only ease and speed up the use of data for its subscribers; it is also another step to an increasingly transparent future in the oil and gas industry – an aim that Rystad Energy has set itself since day one. As such, URank is a great addition to the E&P and oilfield service databases UCube and DCube that are also currently available to the market through the Rystad website.
Rystad Energy now has offices in Norway, UK and USA as well as research and reseller teams in Asia.
Chemostrat Open Perth Office
Continued global demand for its specialist chemostratigraphy services in the oil and gas industry means that Chemostrat International Ltd, which is based in Welshpool in North Wales – a place not renowned as the centre of the hydrocarbon industry – has opened a new office in Perth, Australia. The company has been steadily growing its client base in the Asia Pacific region, with projects underway from Australia, Indonesia, China, Malaysia and Thailand, including work on the exciting new shale gas developments that are revolutionising the energy sector, so opening a presence closer to the marketplace seemed an obvious move. It already has a US subsidiary, Chemostrat Inc., based in the oil capital of the world, Houston, where a team of geologists and support staff provide services throughout the Americas.
New IOR Centre
In August Norwegian oil company Statoil declared that it was targeting a 60% average oil recovery rate from its fields on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. To assist in this aim, the company recently announced that it has begun building a major research centre for improving oil recovery (IOR).
With an average recovery rate of 50%, compared with a global average of just 35% (recovery rate is calculated by dividing the volume of recoverable oil by the volume of estimated oil-in-place), Statoil is already a world leader in oil recovery. In fact, the company was recently awarded the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s prize for IOR for its work in increasing recovery in the Oseberg field in the Norwegian North Sea, where the plan to develop the field using injected water was changed to gas injection, generating an additional 400–500 MMbo.
The new centre is located next to the company’s existing research facility in Trondheim, in northern Norway, and Statoil plans to use it to support the company in providing new technologies and methods to help maximise production on Statoil’s fields both on the Norwegian Continental Shelf and internationally. The centre will concentrate on attempting to understand why different technologies perform as they do and which are most efficient at IOR.
Statoil’s subsurface team at the Oseberg field recently won an award for IOR. Photo: Øyvind Hagen/Statoil
Lebanon Multi-Client 3D Survey
Seismic company Spectrum has completed the first phase of its 3D Multi-Client survey in the Levantine Basin offshore Lebanon. The survey, which was carried out in cooperation with Dolphin Geophysical using their vessel Polar Duke, acquired 2,320 km2 in the highly prospective south-west corner of Lebanon’s Exclusive Economic Zone, and is expected to expand to incorporate up to 3,000 km2 when completed. Data acquisition is being undertaken under contract to the Ministry of Energy and Water of Lebanon. Some fast track data has been processed onboard the Polar Duke and this will be completed during Q4 2012 and the final 3D volume will be available in early 2013 to coincide with the anticipated first offshore Lebanon Bid round.
Structures and stratigraphic features are already being identified throughout the Miocene that were not seen within the 2D data. Spectrum states that the quality of the seismic data from the Polar Duke is outstanding and is eagerly anticipating the results from the data processing, particularly as the survey is within 70km of Noble’s world class gas discoveries and with the first bid round getting 2increasingly close. The company presented its initial resource assessment of the study area at two recent industry conferences on the Eastern Mediterranean in London and Geneva.
Spectrum is confident that its initial assessment of 25 Tcfg in the 3D study area will increase as it identifies more structures and prospects and refines estimates in current data processing projects.
Source: Spectrum
