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…
Geology & Geophysics
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…
Ripples and plane beds
The Cutoff Formation, currently exposed in the Guadalupe Mountains in Texas, USA, was deposited over a drowned shelf margin in Permian times. The name of the formation is derived from…
Why the pandemic might have left bp drilling a dry well in Canada
“We had a very limited time window to operate in, in fact, it was too short to acquire 3D seismic data,” says consultant geologist Peter Mikkelsen from Navitas Petroleum. Navitas…
A Libyan core in Scotland
Issue 3 came very close to the wire, and it was a marathon! Most people expect this magazine to appear at regular two-months intervals, but our agenda is very much…
How AVO has been and continues to be an essential tool in de-risking the world’s high-impact exploration wells
Henry Pettingill, who is a geologist by training, became the head of the Rose DHI Consortium after having been a member for eighteen years. Geophysicist Rocky Roden has been a…
Unlocking fractured basement reservoirs
Fractured basement reservoirs, often igneous or metamorphic rocks like granite or gneiss, contrast with conventional sedimentary reservoirs. Without primary porosity, they depend on fracture networks for hydrocarbon storage and flow.…
Coring process step by step
We often talk about core being the only ground-truth data from the subsurface, but how is core cut from a well at kilometres depth? With many geologists being stuck to…
How a recently acquired mining core became a new reference section for the Triassic of the North Sea
In north Yorkshire, United Kingdom, a huge mine is being constructed by AngloAmerican to produce polyhalite from an Upper Permian evaporite succession. In order to design the shafts, a borehole…
A cool vitrinite reflectance model
A basin model describes the thermal evolution of a basin to estimate when its source rocks expel hydrocarbons and of what type. Basin models do so by evaluating a number…
I talk of dreams
I am a dreamer. I always have been. Though not on the scale of Alexander the Great or Martin Luther King, but I do dream every night, with complex narratives…
Carboniferous-Permian erosive contact, Kowala Quarry, Poland
A spectacular erosive contact between Permian continental conglomerates and Lower Carboniferous marine strata can be observed at the Kowala Quarry in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains, Poland, situated in the southeastern part…