A major and not-on-trend discovery in Kuwait
Kuwait is not the first country one would associate with places ramping up efforts to discover more oil. At the end of the day, the small Gulf country is home…
Oil & Gas
The birth of a new play
This is a story of how subsurface data was used in the way it should be – to incrementally gain a better understanding of how a petroleum system works. And…
Disentangling a deep oil play
Over the course of 10 years, Shell had ample reasons to walk away from the Norphlet play in the GOM. Deeply buried, this Upper Jurassic system was always near the…
Ivorian renaissance
The petroleum provinces of Cote d’Ivoire are amongst the hottest properties in the exploration sector at the moment. While oil and gas regulators and operators work hard to stimulate investment…
Bid rounds – is it time to consider another model?
Against a backdrop of civil unrest, political uncertainty and unattractive fiscal regimes, it is no surprise that there is limited interest from international investors to embark on an exploration adventure…
Finding oil in synclines
This week, I came across the concept of finding oil in synclines on a number of unrelated occasions. It simply shows how diverse geology and exploration are. The first example…
The geoscience of decommissioning
“ Let’s not try to sugarcoat it, it wasn’t always easy”, she continues. “The pandemic unfolded, and taking care of homeschooling, a full-time job and completing the university modules on…
Drilling deeper than the primary target – the next frontier?
The idea for this story was born when I saw a LinkedIn post from Mike Smith in the USA in which he wrote about a well in the Gulf of…
Imagine – heating your house using gas produced by 1.3 billion-year-old blue-green algae
Compared to gas from the Beetaloo Basin, shale gas from the USA is just a teenager, with the age of the Pennsylvanian source rocks hovering around 350 million years. The…
Canada – and the workhorse behind its continued rise in oil production
With Equinor breaking the news last month that its Sitka prospect only contained non-commercial amounts of oil, another disappointing drilling result hit the exploration community in Canada. Sitka was supposed…
Why political endorsement of the oil and gas industry won’t bring back the majors straight away
It is too easy to think that a policy reversal in favour of oil and gas exploration such as the one that was recently announced for New Zealand will immediately…
It was not a geologist who found oil at Spindletop
It is a murky Friday morning, and it looks as if the sky is about to let go of some more rain anytime. The South Texas plain is flat, vast…