The human touch in reservoir modelling
As our 30-minute conversation took place on a Tuesday morning in early September, three emails arrived in Bastian’s inbox. Three separate and unrelated enquiries from customers in Switzerland, Germany, and…
Technology
Seabed mapping – let AI do the work
“I spent days, if not weeks, trawling through high-resolution photos,” a geoscientist from an oil and gas company recently told me. Why did he do that? He carried out this…
Using horizontal drilling technology to permanently store radioactive waste
“We get that question a lot,” says Rod Baltzer, CEO of Deep Isolation, when he calls in from Dallas. “But no, oil and gas wells cannot be easily converted to…
Blurring the line between geology and reservoir engineering
How often has it happened that a dynamic simulation grid turns out to be not fit for purpose because something goes wrong – too fast a pressure build-up, too fast…
“I’m exceptionally bullish about the future”
“As an industry, we have come a long way. From drilling vertical wells to slanted wells, then using slotted liners in horizontal wells, via passive inflow strategies to now active…
Finding the right needle in the haystack
The ultimate question every operator faces is whether there is room to arrest the decline of their producing field by investing to increase the recovery factor. One of the most…
Shale 3.0
With reports that output from the US shale basins is creaming, combined with price pressure on production and environmental concerns, there has never been a better time to invest in…
AI and the future of subsurface discovery: Are we asking the right questions?
The question at the heart of geoethics today isn’t just whether we should use artificial intelligence (AI) in geoscience, it’s how we use it, to what end, and what that…
How advanced seismic inversion and a sound depositional model led to the successful appraisal of an initially uneconomic discovery
Let’s take a step back and look at the structures targeted in the early days of North Sea exploration. It is no surprise that back then, the big fields were…
Basin modelling in the age of AI: A partnership, not a replacement
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are now part of many professional domains – from healthcare to engineering – and the subsurface is no exception. In basin and…
Some snakes don’t bite
Everybody is talking about machine learning and big data these days, but what does it mean in reality, and how do geoscientists embrace it in their daily lives? To learn…
Thinking like a geologist in the age of AI
We’re all feeling a tension as geoscientists: Caught between an old way of working and a rapidly changing future dominated by Artificial Intelligence. As the dust starts to settle, another…