Half full or half empty
“Oil major ExxonMobil bets that through technological advances, shale producers can manage to double crude output from their existing wells.” That was one of the headlines from an article published…
Technology
Rapid and long-lasting sealing of bedrock using concretion-forming resin
Wells and underground excavations typically require effective permanent sealing when they have fulfilled their intended functions. Abandonment of hydrocarbon production or CO₂ injection wells or sealing of underground waste repositories are…
If you are not using ensemble modeling, you are most likely leaving money on the table
Most reservoir development or management decisions require a three-dimensional numerical representation of the reservoir. Intuitively, that digital representation consists of a single model to which all subsurface disciplines contribute to…
Directional drilling is going Wild
Twitter can be a good source of information as to what is going in the oil and gas sector, especially in the US. There are a few people from the…
The drilling hazard that has become a prospective target
This year’s gas demand surge and associated price hike have led many companies to re-initiate exploration for gas. On that basis, shallow gas accumulations have re-appeared on the global exploration…
Dropping nodes from a supply vessel
“While the node market has evolved in the sense that individual nodes have become smaller and therefore lighter to handle”, a completely new way of operating these devices has not…
Your ChatGPT-powered personal subsurface document assistant
During meetings, we often encounter detailed and specific questions, such as whether a particular well had shows in the Jurassic, why a licence was relinquished, or if there are any…
Machine learning validation – An often understated requirement in geophysics
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, which entails a neural network with three or more layers. It is thanks to deep learning that applications from fault picking to…
Nature’s microplastics
Palynologists are palaeontologists who specialise in microfossils composed of acid-resistant carbon-hydrogen-oxygen biopolymer. In other words, their fossils are nature’s microplastics. Resistant to almost anything diagenesis can throw at them, fossil…
The next step in a digital journey
Sometimes one hears people from operators moan about service company folk trying to sell their products at conferences. Such remarks do not do justice to these companies, as they are…
Swimming in subsurface data
In the UK, it is not that long ago that people had to go to the Department of Energy and Climate Change – which is now the North Sea Transition…
Maximising the potential of seismic expressions
Spectral decomposition methods are widely used to highlight geological features according to their frequency content. However, the frequencies characterising the targeted event might vary spatially, which complicates their extraction as…