Long-distance up-flank oil migration offshore Brazil
This article discusses the results of a four-year 3D Earth modelling project that included detailed seismic mapping of 17 surfaces between the seafloor and the top of the Moho, using…
Oil & Gas
Who retires first – me or the field I’m working on?
Full disclosure: the thoughts put down in this article are all my own. I have not performed any interviews for this piece, and draw purely on observations made over the…
A new frontier for Nigeria’s stranded associated gas
Nigeria’s Niger Delta remains one of the world’s most prolific hydrocarbon provinces. Yet, the region continues to grapple with the challenge of managing and monetising associated gas (AG) in oil…
It doesn’t need to be clay mineral diagenesis
Last year, we published an article about the presence of freshwater signals in deep-marine sandstones. It was an observation made by an explorer in the Pomboo well drilled in deepwater…
How Bolivia’s search for additional petroleum resources relates to Devonian paleogeography and paleolatitude
Oil and mostly gas exploration in Bolivia has always focused on structural traps in the Andes fold and thrust-belt. Not that it was easy to drill there; overpressure, hard-to-interpret land…
A blowout in Mexico
An onshore rig drilling an exploration well (Krem-1 EXP) in Mexico got into trouble on Thursday last week when it apparently hit a gas-bearing zone at a depth of around…
Venezuela, Greenland, Iran and oil
Javier Blas wrote in a recent post that “the US shale revolution hands the US a much stronger hand in controlling prices.” That’s why he suggested that the oil price…
A big new discovery or a confirmation of what was already known
The Chinese are quite good at issuing press releases at interesting moments, and the one announcing the discovery of 100 M t (around 720 MMbbl) of oil in the Bohai…
A key testing ground for exploration strategies
The Atlantic Margin is one of the most consistently successful exploration provinces globally, delivering material discoveries across multiple basins and exploration cycles. Since 2010, more than 70 Bnboe has been…
An impression of the state of the industry in Russia
Following the onset of the war in Ukraine, news about the E&P business in Russia seems to have become even more scarce than it already was. For this article, I…
The Black Sea is back
The region took a huge leap forward in 2020 when the Turkish state energy company Türkiye Petrolleri Anonim Ortaklığı (TPAO) announced the giant Tuna-1 gas discovery in the western basin…
KOC continues its exploration success in what could be described as a syncline
A bit more than a year ago, KOC announced the discovery of oil and gas in the Al-Nokhatha structure offshore Kuwait. Based on regional data and the location of the…