Issue 6

Vol. 11

This edition of GEO ExPro Magazine focuses on Australasia, the Indian Subcontinent and New Technologies

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Columns

3 Contents

5 Editorial

6 Market Update

8 Update

14 Licensing Opportunities

16 A Minute to Read

26 GEO Profile: Ruth Schmidt – An Extraordinary, Unknown Career

30 GEO Tourism: The Kutch Basin, Western India

64 Recent Advances in Technology: Gas Hydrates V – The Resource Potential

92 GEO Education: Rejuvenating Opportunities

96 What I Do: The Chief Geophysicist

98 GEO Cities: Midland, Texas

100 Exploration Update

102 GEO Media: The End of Country

104 Q&A

106 Hot Spot: Paraguay Draws Attention

108 Global Resource Management

Features

20 Cover Story – Exploration: The Great Australian Bight

36 Foldout: Global Plate Tectonic Modelling

42 Technology Explained: A New Approach to Cores

46 Exploration: Madagascar – A New East African Oil Play

52 Technology Explained: Dynamic Topography

58 Foldout: The Australian North West Shelf

70 Reservoir Management: Kirkuk – A Silent Giant Oilfield

74 Industry Issues: Decarbonising Energy

80 Foldout: UtStord and South Viking Graben

86 Industry Issues: Safeguarding Your Petrotechnical Professionals

90 Technology Explained: DAS – Listening In Downhole

Articles

Paraguay Draws Industry Attention

It is fashionable to identify deepwater regions, unconventional plays and the Arctic as the ‘hot spots’ in the current global exploration scene. In recent years, violence, tension with governments and power struggles Read More

Explaining US$85 per Barrel

Nobody – absolutely nobody – was able to predict what was about to happen. In just three years, oil production from tight* reservoirs in the US tripled from 1 MMbopd Read More

3D Seismic and SHarp Broadband 2D – UtStord and South Viking Graben

3D seismic and SHarp Broadband 2D from the UtStord and South Viking Graben areas of the UK-Norwegian North Sea show improved imaging throughout the entire geological section. In 2013 Dolphin Read More

Global Plate Tectonic Modelling

Constrained By Data Well and seismic data can be very sparse in frontier regions; however Getech’s extensive global gravity and magnetic database, the largest commercially available dataset of its kind, Read More

Hard Work and Innovation

What led you to found DownUnder GeoSolutions? I had always wanted to start my own business. Whilst working in Houston (for BHP Billiton) I had witnessed companies, similar to what Read More

Bangladesh Offers New Exploration Arena

The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague has delineated the maritime border between India and Bangladesh. The peaceful settlement of the border dispute is a positive step in improving Read More

Safeguarding Your Petrotechnical Professionals

Oiling the machine with a new contract between management and the petrotechnical professional. The continued search for oil and gas relies in equal measure on good management and superior petrotechnical Read More

A New Approach to Cores

Digital archiving of core information affords the oil and gas industry an opportunity for rapid evaluation of core. The keys to the efficacy and value of cores in the oil Read More

An Extraordinary, Unknown Career

Surviving the Great Alaska Earthquake was a historical achievement for American geologist Ruth A.M. Schmidt. Other feats were revealed only after her death. Friends and colleagues have no trouble finding Read More

Decarbonising Energy

Scientists tells us that any rise in global temperatures needs to be limited to less than two degrees over pre-industrial times. Displacing coal is the primary focus. Does gas provide Read More

Kirkuk. A Silent Giant Oilfield

The giant Kirkuk field, discovered in 1927, has had a very chequered history and requires imaginative reservoir engineering methods to return it to optimum productivity. The Kirkuk oilfield is partly Read More

Keep on Innovating

Technological progress and innovation are key to the oil and gas industry. We may have found the ‘easy’ resources – although the geologists who explored for hydrocarbons with a compass and a hand-drawn map Read More

The Great Australian Bight An Emerging Global Hotspot

Scale and ambition are accurate words to describe new oil exploration underway in the Great Australian Bight, but they do not quite do it justice. To get a real sense Read More

Dynamic Topography Sheds New Light

The new field of dynamic topography is changing our understanding of the sedimentary record. Australia is at the centre of its own tectonic plate and a safe distance from the powerful Read More

Rejuvenating Opportunities

“If we don’t invest in our people and the brainpower they bring to the table, we won’t have a sustainable exploration business. And one way to invest in the brainpower is to Read More

Gas Hydrates – Part V: The Resource Potential

The gas hydrate resource is a function of geology, technology, policy, and market conditions. As we have seen, the commercial resource and recovery potential of gas hydrate strongly depends on Read More

The End of an Era – or More of the Same?

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who died in January 2015, had effectively ruled Saudi Arabia since 1996. During that time he introduced some tentative reforms but basically continued the ‘status Read More

Midland, Texas: Gateway to the Permian Basin

If there is any city that deserves the title of ‘Oil City’, it would have to be Midland, sitting as it does atop one of the most prolific oil-producing areas of the US. Starting Read More

Communicating Naturally

Critical decision making can be speeded up through Natural Language Generation software, a technique that originated in the medical world. On the surface, you might not think that the oil Read More

A New Oil Play in East Africa

Following the recent discoveries off Tanzania and Mozambique, a newly acquired 2D seismic data set (MAD13) which clearly illustrates the tectonic setting and prospectivity of offshore western Madagascar is set Read More

The Kutch Basin of Western India

The fault blocks of the Kutch Basin in western India offer to the visitor a unique opportunity to observe the Jurassic-Cretaceous-Paleogene sediments rarely outcropping anywhere else on the Western Indian Read More

The Chief Geophysicist

My undergraduate degree, at the University of Connecticut, was in geology, but I took a geophysics course in the final year and really enjoyed it, so I decided to do Read More

The global energy sector from a subsurface perspective