Dead oil traces in a lonely pebble bed
Where most exploration activity on the UK Continental Shelf took place in the North Sea, and later along the Atlantic Margin west of the Shetland Islands (WOS), it is good…
Geology & Geophysics
Porosity in compressional stress regimes
Porosity prediction sits at the heart of basin models and prospect evaluation. It underpins our understanding of reservoir quality, pore pressure, and thermal history. Traditionally, porosity has been modelled as…
Sponge clasts in calciturbidites
At the recent IMAGE Conference in Houston, somebody told me that the Permian Basin in Texas is not only famous for its hydrocarbon resources, but also because the uplifted areas…
Pasties, piskies, pegmatites… and Pliny
Britain has strong, quiet, ancient communities on its further reaches: Norse Shetland, Gaelic and Doric Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Cornwall at the southwest tip. All connected by…
Decoding slip with tension gashes
Tenson gashes are fractures in rocks formed under extensional stress, often filled with minerals like quartz or calcite. These features are key kinematic indicators in structural geology, revealing fault slip…
“The day I cut an 88 ft core of top seal”
“LinkedIn seems to be the place to brag about your career successes,” says Luke Johnson from TRACS International in this video. But sometimes, it is things that went wrong that…
Submarine avalanches in a serendipitous find
In the depths of the North Sea lies one of the most spectacular records of turbidity currents: The Claymore Sandstone. During the Upper Jurassic, these rocks were born from a…
Bottom-up meets top-down
If there is one positive aspect to this day and age, it is the ability to form solid working relationships even when people are living at opposite ends of the…
Flame structures
Outcrops remind us of the risks of applying a layer-cake approach to correlating well data. Turbidite lobes pinching out, channels abruptly transitioning to floodplain deposits or carbonate platforms only developing…
Energy is politics, is community, is pride
My dear friend William invited me last month to Brecon, mid Wales. Another dear friend, Ian, lives in Penarth, just outside Cardiff, south Wales, so it made perfect sense to…
The evolution of fault interpretation
Before the advent of 3D seismic data in the 1980s and 2D seismic in the 1970s, subsurface geologists typically depicted or interpreted faults as vertical or nearly vertical. Consequently, these…
What is a good source rock?
I recently worked in a well-established basin with proven hydrocarbon accumulations. To my surprise, all reports and published papers routinely talked about local source rocks with barely 1 % Total…