A seismic facies library
Seismic facies classification can be a tedious process, especially in an exploration context where large areas need to be assessed. In order to speed up that process, using a library…
Technology
Why is so much subsurface technology coming from Norway?
First of all, a warning. I am not going to provide a well-researched answer to the question posed in the title. Instead, I intend to put forward a few recent…
The gamification of the oil and gas industry
“Imagine a world where labour is obsolete”, says Yu-kai Chou at the start of a TEDx Talk delivered for the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 2014. “And I’m not…
A 1 % error margin is not acceptable anymore
It is something that many geoscientists may not think about daily, but there is a whole community in the upstream oil and gas sector that is working to make sure…
The time of deep resistivity
Times are gone that deep resistivity tools are only being used for geo-steering. The inverted data help build geomodels, help estimate net pay thickness away from well data and see…
Integration of structural and stratigraphic data using automated workflows
Geoscientists rely on their pattern recognition ability every day, comparing already known sedimentary and structural fabrics with new ones when diving into new datasets. However, with the increase in size…
The new kids on the geosteering block
For some people, the pandemic came at the right time. That certainly applies to wellsite geologists Amin, Ammar and Rafi representing BITCAP, a new start-up that released its first commercial…
Digitisation before digitalisation
When a country where some previous exploration efforts took place decides to run another licensing round in an attempt to attract interest from the global exploration community, legacy data quickly…
Data is not the new oil
“Deeply misleading”, that’s how Thomas Halsey describes the commonly cited phrase “Data is the new oil”. At least when it comes to data held by the upstream industry. The main…
Seeing around OBM
Geochemical analyses focused on characterising oil are frequently challenged by contamination with oil-based muds (OBM). This renders the results either uncertain or in some cases unusable, particularly in solvent extraction…
The Low Earth Orbit satellites are coming
Until very recently, seismic acquisition companies only “saw” the data resulting from a marine survey when the vessel returned to shore. Of course, basic quality control of the data always…
Getting increasingly complicated reservoirs to surface
“In a way, we have benefitted from the slowdown in drilling activity”, says Steve Rait from Reservoir Group when we meet at the company’s coring headquarters just north of Europe’s…