When energy stopped being treated as real
The policy responses of that period reflected this understanding. France invested heavily in nuclear power to reduce exposure to imported fuels. The UK committed capital and labour to developing the…
Oil & Gas
bp and Brazil
In August 2025, bp announced the much-needed news that its exploration well designated 1-BP-13-SPS in the Bumerangue Production Sharing Contract block, located in the prolific Santos Basin, was a significant…
Grand plans, challenging geology
Two things came together for bp in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. First, there were significant oil discoveries in Colombia. Then came the Apertura in Venezuela in the…
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…
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…