Drilling deeper than the primary target – the next frontier?
The idea for this story was born when I saw a LinkedIn post from Mike Smith in the USA in which he wrote about a well in the Gulf of…
Posts by Henk Kombrink
What it takes to organize a conference
“As a geoscientist, it is very rewarding and useful to help shape a conference like IMAGE”, says Daniel Sutton when we catch up at the fringe of the exhibition floor.…
Imagine – heating your house using gas produced by 1.3 billion-year-old blue-green algae
Compared to gas from the Beetaloo Basin, shale gas from the USA is just a teenager, with the age of the Pennsylvanian source rocks hovering around 350 million years. The…
Canada – and the workhorse behind its continued rise in oil production
With Equinor breaking the news last month that its Sitka prospect only contained non-commercial amounts of oil, another disappointing drilling result hit the exploration community in Canada. Sitka was supposed…
Gravel and geothermal energy
It is well-known that Munich is benefiting from a favourable setting in terms of deep geothermal energy production. A little less well-known is that Munich also sits on a much…
Why political endorsement of the oil and gas industry won’t bring back the majors straight away
It is too easy to think that a policy reversal in favour of oil and gas exploration such as the one that was recently announced for New Zealand will immediately…
It was not a geologist who found oil at Spindletop
It is a murky Friday morning, and it looks as if the sky is about to let go of some more rain anytime. The South Texas plain is flat, vast…
Does Denmark really want onshore CO2 storage?
Less than a year ago, we published an article about what was supposed to be Europe’s first full-scale and commercial onshore CO2 storage project, aimed to be operational next year.…
Has Norway’s drive to find more gas in the Barents Sea paid off yet?
Fuelled by the gas crisis that unfolded in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Norwegians voiced hopes that the Barents Sea was the place where additional gas resources were…
Applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Carbon Capture and Storage Well Design
CFD is used to model the leak rate of CO₂ through abandoned wells and to verify that the leak rates are As Low As Reasonably Possible. The risk of loss…
FORGE – first injection test successfully completed but no pressure equilibrium achieved
A couple of months ago, the FORGE project in Utah, USA, reported a successful stimulation and circulation test at their flagship Enhanced Geothermal Systems project. “These tests in stimulated hot…
The new kids on the geosteering block
For some people, the pandemic came at the right time. That certainly applies to wellsite geologists Amin, Ammar and Rafi representing BITCAP, a new start-up that released its first commercial…