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 cut core, even though the reservoir was very well-known at that point in time, after decades of production. To make it even more interesting, coring was planned to take place in the immediate overburden. It turned out that the operator was carrying out a study to better understand the geomechanics of the overburden and how to land wells into the reservoir. Many holes turned out to have stability issues, and the direction of the wellbore could have something to do with that. It seems like the study paid off.
A BLOWOUT IN BANGLADESH
During a network session the other day, I met a driller who worked for a major operator in the 1980s. It was the time expats were sent from one place to another without much consideration for individual preferences. As such, the driller found himself assigned to a well in Bangladesh, in the southeast of the country. When he asked about the risk of shallow gas, his colleagues at headquarters told him there was no risk. He wasn’t sure, though, and did some scouting around the place. By doing so, he soon found out that locals were using shallow gas for domestic purposes, clearly suggesting that his colleagues had missed something. And to make matters worse, a blowout even happened when drilling the well. Due to shallow gas. Fortunately, the well could be controlled with cement, and nothing serious happened. To the driller, it had not been too much of a surprise at least. The value of dipping into local knowledge.
DATA SHARING IS FINE, BUT COMES AT A PRICE
Last year, I asked Danish geothermal energy developer Innargi if it would be possible to get insight into the wells they drilled in Aarhus as part of a big geothermal project. At the time, they said the data package was possibly going to be released later. When I asked again at the start of this year, the reply was that the data can not be made available because of a potential sale to companies working in the CCS space in Denmark. That is an interesting development; at times when we hear that data needs to be shared more widely and openly, especially in the renewable energy sector, where margins are slim already, we see the opposite happening.
KUWAIT IS GOING FOR IT
A person with knowledge of the matter recently told me that KOC is very actively pursuing different opportunities to increase production. Why is this a key observation? It is a key observation because it shows that the country is trying hard to arrest the natural decline in production, and that there is no easy fix. Yet another example that easy oil is over.
