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…
Posts by Henk Kombrink
Chasing zombie wells
“It doesn’t have the dramatic fire and oil shooting out like the bp Macondo well. No, here, in the Permian Basin, wells are spewing fully saturated brine instead”, says Sarah…
A 100% success rate
A little bit of humour is a very effective way to dress up a conversation, and VP Exploration at Petronas Mohd Redhani did just that during today’s opening session at…
Is carbon capture and storage really a fantasy?
In July, the Pulitzer Center published an article entitled “Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution”. The authors state that…
Africa on course for busiest year since 2020
“Combined with the commercial success rate for the wells drilled so far being better than 50%, this year is looking promising for hydrocarbon exploration across the African continent”, said Jamie…
Removing barriers to geothermal project development
Trying to work with the current myriads of non-standardised terms, definitions, and well design types for geothermal projects is challenging. Interest in the sector is growing rapidly, but its technical…
Data is not the new oil
“Deeply misleading”, that’s how Thomas Halsey describes the commonly cited phrase “Data is the new oil”. At least when it comes to data held by the upstream industry. The main…
Peat: So hot right now
“The offshore wind sector is still very much a geotechnical exercise”, I was told recently by someone with knowledge on the matter. “But that model is due an update.” Despite…
Another gas discovery confirmed in Colombia, but the real excitement has yet to start
“You’ll be hard-pressed not to find gas out there”, was Joshua Turner’s response on LinkedIn to the news of Petrobras’ reported success drilling the Uchuva-2 appraisal well. The area where…
Seeing around OBM
Geochemical analyses focused on characterising oil are frequently challenged by contamination with oil-based muds (OBM). This renders the results either uncertain or in some cases unusable, particularly in solvent extraction…
The Low Earth Orbit satellites are coming
Until very recently, seismic acquisition companies only “saw” the data resulting from a marine survey when the vessel returned to shore. Of course, basic quality control of the data always…
How the winner of a technology competition made room for the losers to take over the market
Sweden comes third in the list of countries using geothermal energy. But it is not deep geothermal energy, it is shallow geothermal – mostly sourced through closed loop systems of…