A shallow geothermal borehole in a single day
“We’re operating five rigs continuously across the UK,” Ashley Lowthian from GreenGlove Boreholes tells me when I visit him and his colleague at a drill site in Garthdee, Aberdeen. Ashley…
Posts by Henk Kombrink
The next step in a digital journey
Sometimes one hears people from operators moan about service company folk trying to sell their products at conferences. Such remarks do not do justice to these companies, as they are…
“I felt like in a knowledge vacuum”
“When starting out my career at Saga Petroleum in the late 1970s, about ten years after the first oil discovery in the Norwegian sector in 1968, I was curious to…
Swimming in subsurface data
In the UK, it is not that long ago that people had to go to the Department of Energy and Climate Change – which is now the North Sea Transition…
More wells should be drilled with water-based mud
“All cuttings brought to surface need to be shipped ashore when they are contaminated with oil-based mud (OBM)”, says Anita Hansen in a recent conversation. Anita has decades’ worth of…
Loke acquires deep-sea mineral licences in the Pacific Ocean
Loke Marine Minerals announced yesterday that it acquired UK Seabed Resources’ deep-sea mineral business. UK Seabed Resources (UKSR) holds a 100% interest in two deep-sea mineral licences located in the…
“Shooting a fish in a barrel”
Conversations at conferences are a good way to verify what people think. And there were many people at this week’s Seapex Conference; with more than 400 participants the number exceeded…
The eyes of North Sea geology
“I never intended to join the oil and gas industry”, says Peter Thorn whilst we are being served a coffee in a café overlooking Aberdeen Harbour on a cold and…
Is it only the windfall tax to blame?
The recently imposed windfall tax by the UK Government has made many oil and gas players decide to postpone, cancel or reroute investments elsewhere. For instance, Total UK announced that…
The production chemistry challenges of geothermal energy
“The geothermal industry requires a much tighter control on scale formation than the oil and gas industry”, said Peter Wilkie from Roemex in a talk delivered during SPE’s online Geothermal…
Cutting data – please handle with care!
“It’s not precise at all, so please handle with care”, is one of the first things Anita Hansen tells me when we meet on Teams. We spoke about working with…
Mapping a fault using induced seismic events
Twenty years ago, Australia saw the start of a big geothermal project in deeply buried basement rocks. Situated in the Cooper Basin, the project included several phases of production testing…