Geology & Geophysics Archives - Page 16 of 19

Geology & Geophysics

Argentina’s pioneers and the secret of Cacheuta

In April 1886, Carlos Fader and the Compañía Mendocina de Petróleo chose a remote spot in Cacheuta, near Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the whole of the Andes, to drill Argentina’s first commercial oil well. Armed with rudimentary machinery, they…

Marcos Asensio, Geologist

September 25, 2026

Why there may be more non-reservoir in your slope channel complex than you think

“Every time I found a very obvious sandy deepwater channel base in outcrop,” says Professor Bryan Cronin from Deep Marine during his Deepwater Reservoirs in E&P course delivered through the SAGA Wisdom online platform, “it was always preceded by mud…

Henk Kombrink

September 21, 2026

Subsurface Evangelising – Preaching to the Choir

The Hanged Man card from the Tarot’s Major Arcana. Illustration: GiftedMG via Pixabay. I was a board member of a small oil company, and we were sent on public relations training. My assessment included the following: “Under no circumstance should…

Juan Cottier, MMbbls Subsurface Consulting

September 17, 2026

Oil fault traps in California’s San Joaquin Basin

The San Joaquin Basin (SJB) is one of the world’s most prolific petroleum provinces and contains numerous oil accumulations that owe much of their trapping mechanism to faults. Unlike many light-oil and gas-prone basins where faults commonly degrade trap integrity,…

Thomas L. Davis and Geoff Gallant

September 7, 2026

Field trips and software don’t mix very well – or do they?

“It was a new thing to us,” says Lilly Walker from RFD when we meet on what is her Wednesday afternoon in Perth, Australia. Lilly is a geologist and joined RFD’s Australia team a little more than a year ago.…

Henk Kombrink

September 4, 2026

The inconvenient truth about pore pressure prediction in unconventional plays

Pore pressure prediction has always been central to safe drilling and well planning. But in the last two decades, during which thousands of wells have been drilled across US unconventional basins, the industry has learned a hard truth: Unconventional basins…

Subsurface Alliance

August 14, 2026

What else is hiding in your reservoir brine?

In oil and gas, water is usually treated as a liability – something to manage, re-inject, or dispose of. But from a geological perspective, produced water is not just a by-product. It is the most mobile part of the system,…

István Nagy-Korodi, Consulting Geologist

July 31, 2026

The class of ’71

I am working on a Brent Province project at the moment. It’s the appraisal of a significant discovery. The Brent is classic petroleum geology – and this project really does feel classic, it feels like heritage, it feels good. The…

Juan Cottier, MMbbls Subsurface Consulting

July 24, 2026

Seismic reflections – lithological boundaries or timelines?

In basic terms, acoustic impedance is a measure of how resistant a material is to sound waves passing through it. When that resistance changes across a lithological boundary, some of the seismic energy bounces back, creating a reflection. Because different…

Henk Kombrink

July 23, 2026

Beyond turbidites: Core insights from the Rovuma Basin

The Rovuma Basin evolved from Early Jurassic rifting into a passive margin by the Mid-Cretaceous, followed by significant clastic infill through the Cretaceous and Tertiary. Uplift associated with the early Paleogene East African Rift System drove substantial sediment supply, feeding…

Corneliu Cosovanu, Core Laboratories

July 17, 2026

Wadi Nukhul – a glimpse of the Red Sea-Gulf of Suez rift system

During the Oligocene and Miocene, a 2,000 km long zone of extension developed that formed the Red Sea-Gulf of Suez rift system. In this outcrop photo, we are looking south in the Wadi Nukhul region on the east coast of…

Ian Sharp, Equinor

July 13, 2026

The rebellious proto-Riedel shear zones

Classic Riedel shears are the first subsidiary fractures that form prior to breakthrough of a master fault. They appear as low-angle (~15°) en echelon arrays oriented synthetically to the principal displacement zone (PDZ), sharing the same sense of slip. This…

Molly Turko, Devon Energy

June 25, 2026

The global energy sector from a subsurface perspective