Oil does not care about boundaries
In the early decades of oil exploration and production, from the 1860s to the early 1900s, the concept of an oil field having clear boundaries was not given much thought.…
Oil & Gas
Record-breaking deep conventional gas discovery points to a major new trend in the Central Perth Basin
Strike Energy* (50 %, operator) and Warrego Energy’s Erregulla Deep-1 (ED-1) well, in EP 469, discovered two high-quality, low-impurity conventional gas reservoirs, totalling 28 m of net gas pay at…
Namibia – Looking at the factors that cause concern when it comes to developing the recent deep-water finds
“People don’t dream anymore”, said Marcio Mello when he started his talk about Namibia’s deep-water petroleum plays at the IMAGE conference in Houston in August 2024, referring to the dreaming…
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…
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…