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Vol. 23

Issue 4

When you bring your colleagues to a new outcrop that nobody has seen before, and everybody is tasked to come up with a story as to how the sediments captured in the outcrop formed, there will no doubt be a wide variety of interpretations. And that is fine. Different people make different observations. In this issue of the magazine, we feature an outcrop from Morocco – both in the cover story as well as in the Outcrop feature at the back of the magazine – that has been interpreted in two very different ways; as a deepwater contourite deposit, or a deltaic and tidal succession. We spoke to the researchers behind these viewpoints to hear their thoughts. Without taking sides, this is where exploration geology finds its roots. We have to discuss the observations we make in order to arrive at a 3D picture of a reservoir, and how different viewpoints exist in that regard. This also leads to the core photo featuring on the front cover, taken from a core display at the GeoConvention in Calgary. The core is from a well drilled into a Lower Carboniferous mud mound, in which horizontal wells are now being drilled. Small as these mud mounds are, and diverse in terms of depositional facies, it is yet another example of acknowledging the heterogeneity that exists within these structures. That’s what makes geoscience so exciting, and that’s also one of the main reasons why so many articles in this issue are worth a read.

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Columns

FIRSTS

8 – Subsurface noise

10 – Energy matters – by Rodney Garrard

11 – Regional update – by Ian Cross

12 – Striking oil – New oil in an old field

INSIGHTS

97 – A geologist ruins everything – Subsurface Evangelising – Preaching to the Choir– by Juan Cottier

98 – Tech Tonics– Why physical collaboration matters in a digital subsurface – by Dan Austin

100 – Reservoir modelling  – Field trips and software don’t mix very well – or do they?

101 – Geoscience Elements – Can cement integrity be predicted before it becomes a containment risk?

102 – Geomechanics – The inconvenient truth about pore pressure prediction in unconventional plays – by Ewerton Araujo

103 – Use your brines – What else is hiding in your reservoir brine? – by István Nagy-Korodi

104 – HotSpot– The supermajors are scaling up, are you?– by NVentures

106 – Petroleum Systems –Top-Down and Bottom-Up – by Lukasz Krawczynski and Martin Neumaier

107 – Faults and Fractures –  Know your faulted folds – by Molly Turko

108 – Nothing beats the field – The 1-meter sand that made the decisive call – by Wouter de Weger and Henk Kombrink

110 – Vertical Geology – Argentina’s pioneers and the secret of Cacheuta – by Marcos Asensio

Features

COVER STORY

14 – Stories from the deep

EXPLORATION OPPORTUNITIES

20 – Poised for passion: The race for riches in Equatorial Guinea’s deepwater – Searcher

36 – Seeing the unseen: New 3D seismic insights from the deepwater Pará-Maranhão Basin – TGS

50 – The deep-water architecture of northern Sierra Leone: A tale of two oceans – GeoPartners

66 – Gravitating towards discoveries in Angola’s onshore Kwanza Basin – Metatek

76 – Exclusive access to Venezuela’s next offshore play – GeoexMCG

90 – The Keta Basin: Ghana’s Deepwater Frontier Edges Back into Focus – Heritage

FROM THE INDUSTRY

46 – Offshore Angola: Exploring frontiers and fringes with new and reprocessed seismic – TGS

OIL & GAS

26 – Listen to the drill bit

27 – Why there may be more non-reservoir in your slope channel complex than you think

28 – Finding oil when everyone expects gas

29 – Harmonising public data with ground truth– by Hana Kabazi

30 – The next test for US shale capital – by Felipe Calderon and Andres Armijos

31 – An imperial testing facility

32 – Chasing mud mounds

34 – Why USGS Yet-to-Find figures are an overestimation

35 – Up or down – in which direction did the sand go?

FEATURES

42 – Narrowing the gap between question and decision point

46 – “Oh, look! Oil everywhere…” – by Ayberk Uyanik

48 – The mood music of the E&P geoscience job market

55 – Oil fault traps in California’s San Joaquin Basin – by Thomas L. Davis and Geoff Gallant

PORTRAITS

58 – Always on the lookout for new frontiers, story of Cany Jobe

GEOTHERMAL ENERGY

62 – Injecting methane in a geothermal well can double its net energy output

63 – Cape Station and the case of the missing reserves report – by Elliot Yearsley

64 – Eavor steps away from operator role in Geretsried

SUBSURFACE STORAGE

72- Spindletop spin-off: Helium storage

73 – Drilling a well to produce nuclear energy

74 – Is pressure space the nail in the coffin for large-scale CO2 injection in saline aquifers?

NEW GAS

82 – Is helium the bonus or the business?

83 – Poland is the only serious helium supplier in the EU, but not because its subsurface is so special

84 – Exploring deep-seated hydrogen fluxes in Nova Scotia

TECHNOLOGY

86 – Why shouldn’t all nodes be the same?

87 – Chasing more subtle changes

88 – Finding hidden faults

Articles

Subsurface noise #9

THE REALITY BEHIND PRESS RELEASES Talking to people is still the best way to find out what really happened when a well has been completed. “We drilled hundreds of meters Read More