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The global energy sector from a subsurface perspective

Vol. 21

Issue 1

Welcome to the first issue of 2024, again packed with subsurface insights and commentary on the global energy sector. We interviewed three people from the fibre optic sensing space to hear how this industry is making waves in subsurface monitoring, with some claiming that any well drilled in the next ten years will be equipped with fibre optic sensing technology. We also welcome a number of new regular contributors from all over the world and bring you new insights from the geothermal, CCS and deep sea mineral space as usual.

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Columns

FIRSTS

5 – Minute to Read
11 – Why? – by Dr Carole Nakhle
12 – Regional Update – by Iain Cross
14 – Striking gas – Norma

INSIGHTS

77 – Geomodelling for CCS, a bridge too far? – by Raffik Lazar
78 – HotSpot – Suriname’s shallow water licensing round – by Jonathan Leather
80 – Can a seal fail? – by David Rajmon
81 – Don’t forget to look deeper – by Molly Turko
82 – Nothing beats the field – Tidally influenced fluvial deposits
84 – Vertical geology – by Marcos Asensio
Tybalt and Bouma

Features

COVER STORY

16 – Fibre optic sensing

NORTH WEST EUROPE

28 – Not as straight as we think
29 – Increase risk!
31 – No more drilling on Forties and Beryl
32 – The price says it all

CONTENT MARKETING

22 – Why the conjugate margin in Uruguay and Southern Brazil may have even more to offer than the Orange Basin in Namibia
42 – A new and unique multi-client core scanning and thin section digital catalog from pre-salt reservoirs offshore Brazil
44 – Rejuvenating legacy seismic for screening carbon storage sites in the Gulf of Mexico

FEATURES

34 – This is the time of subsurface by-products
35 – Chasing giant oil prospects on the Arabian Platform in southeastern Türkiye
38 – Oil – and increasingly gas – on steroids
40 – A working petroleum system on purely oceanic crust

PORTRAITS

48 – Salt and Grit – Clara Rodríguez Rondón

GEOTHERMAL ENERGY

54 – A new closed-loop horizontal geothermal well solution

56 – A puncture in a geothermal seal
58 – Geothermal potential of Ukraine
60 – After four years of production, what is the verdict?

SUBSURFACE STORAGE

62 – “It is important to embrace what matters in other subsurface realms”
63 – Wind and solar energy – temporarily stored in a salt cavern
64 – The challenges and success factors for CCS in Australia

TECHNOLOGY
66 – In the near future, will fibre optic sensing technology be used in most of the newly drilled oil, gas, geothermal and carbon storage wells?
67 – Grain size distribution matters
68 – The competitive world of coring

DEEP SEA MINERALS
70 – Norway opens for seabed mineral activities
71 – Finding deep sea minerals with oil and gas technology

Articles

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 Read More

Salt and Grit

“My fascination with geology started with asking myself a question”, says Clara Rodríguez Rondón. “I grew up in Venezuela, in a town called San Juan de Los Morros, in a Read More

Geothermal potential of Ukraine

Ukraine has several geothermal sites and resources, especially in the Transcarpathia region and in the southern part of the country. However, the development of geothermal resources has not been extensively Read More

Geomodelling for CCS, a bridge too far?

Traditionally, geomodels are built in a simplistic fashion, taking into account the inherent degree of uncertainty in the input data. Attempting to accurately depict an unseen geological object, often multiple Read More

Why?

Many question why oil and gas companies are still investing in the sector, at a time when the fight against global warming is intensifying and the world is keen on Read More

Increase risk!

“Have we run out of new ideas?”, asked Kjersti Dahle from the Norwegian Offshore Directorate (NOD) rhetorically during her keynote speech at the NCS Exploration Strategy conference in Stavanger last Read More

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 Read More

A puncture in a geothermal seal

More than fifteen years ago, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) was one of the first institutions in the Netherlands to come up with the idea to warm their premises Read More

Bouma and Tybalt

The Bouma sequence, proposed by Arnold Bouma, has been a cornerstone in the interpretation of turbidites and high-density sediment currents since its publication in 1962. The Bouma sequence is a Read More

A dissolvable tool

Andrew Garioch from Well-SENSE talks us through the use of fibre-optic technology for well intervention work

Can a seal fail?

A seal is a rock that has a higher capillary entry pressure relative to other adjacent rocks. The higher the contrast, the greater the hydrocarbon column it can hold. The Read More

Don’t forget to look deeper

As oil and gas geoscientists, we often focus on the reservoir we are targeting. Seldom do we consider what might be happening deeper, especially in basement rocks. However, what happens Read More

Not as straight as we sometimes think

Of course, field observations have long shown that faults are not the perfectly straight lines we often see in schematic cross-sections. However, subsurface data do not always allow the detailed Read More