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…
Technology
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…
Grain size distribution matters
For sedimentologists, describing the grain size of core samples is key because it provides valuable information about the sedimentary environment, depositional processes, petrophysical properties, and the history of the area…
Answering the 3-billion fossil question
The Norwegian Offshore Directorate (NOD) is undertaking a massive and innovative project to digitalize their comprehensive archive of palynology slides, thereby propelling the field of biostratigraphy into the digital age.…
Can map tools find relevant documents?
Putting documents and presentations on a map isn’t anything new. To do this we can just look up our various place names (known as “toponyms”) and then when these names…
The competitive world of coring
Until wireline logging came into swing, cutting core was the most important way to obtain reliable information about the targeted formation. With the advance of wireline logging though, the need…
“In this case, we’d rather find the smallest prospect”
In the continued discussion around the poor state of exploration drilling in the UK versus all those wells that are being drilled in Norwegian waters, it is so easy to…
“In 10 years, nobody would risk installing a subsea well without fibre optic sensing”
It is corrosion resistant, has a long lifetime, no electronics are required downhole, and the “cable” is only a quarter of a millimeter thick. Fibre optic sensing technology has a…