Technology

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…

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…