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The global energy sector from a subsurface perspective

Vol. 23

Issue 1

The year started with a flurry of news in which the subsurface played a prominent role. Greenland had been simmering for a while, but the lifting of Maduro from Venezuela came as a huge surprise to many. Immediately, questions around the rebuilding of oil infrastructure started circulating, which has been ongoing until today.

Instead of putting in our two cents, we look back at the Apertura, the last time Venezuela opened its doors to foreign oil companies.

One of them was bp, and we tell the story of how they redeveloped Pedernales in the Orinoco delta. Not because it is THE example, but because it is AN example of how things can pan out. We talked to both local people and expats who worked on Pedernales and shared their fascinating stories.

And that is not the only Venezuela-themed article in this issue of the magazine. We also talked to two former PDVSA employees who lost their jobs in the early 2000’s shortly after Chavez took to power and fired almost 20,000 PDVSA employees who had joined a strike against the regime. Even though it is more than 20 years ago, people are still concerned about repercussions, which is why we spoke to them anonymously.

Apart from the two articles on Venezuela, this issue is packed with content from all over the world, as always, and reports on behind-the-scenes developments in addition to insights from a wide range of contributors.

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Columns

FIRSTS

8 – Subsurface noise

10 – Energy matters – by Rodney Garrard

11 – Regional update – by Ian Cross

12 – Striking gas – A big new discovery or a confirmation of what was already known

INSIGHTS

86 – A Geologist Ruins Everything – Love and sex and oil and passion – by Juan Cottier

87 – Reservoir models – Producing more by producing less

88 – HotSpot – What is the driver for drilling two costly exploration wells offshore Bulgaria? – by NVentures

90 – Use your brines – When the lithium cycle bites back – by István Nagy-Korodi

91 – Petroleum Systems –How to generate an oil accumulation in a gas-prone petroleum system? – by Lukasz Krawczynski and Martin Neumaier

92 – Recognising structural inversion – by Molly Turko

98 – Greenland’s unconformity – by Ian Sharp and Steven Andrews

100 – Vertical Geology – Not too many, not too few – by Henk Kombrink and Marcos Asensio

Features

COVER STORY

14 – Grand plans, challenging geology

EXPLORATION OPPORTUNITIES

20 – Inside every Basin you know is another Basin you haven’t met – Searcher

48 – Moroccan Atlantic Margin: Where geological diversity meets outstanding exploration potential – ONHYM

76 – Most subsurface teams aren’t making the most of their data – Earth Science Analytics

OIL & GAS

26 – It doesn’t need to be clay mineral diagenesis

27 – An impression of the state of the industry in Russia

28 – A key testing ground for exploration strategies – by Jamie McGreevy

29 – How Bolivia’s search for additional petroleum resources relates to Devonian paleogeography and paleolatitude

30 – The Gambia’s offshore acreage is hot again

31 – Why post well analysis matters

32 – One block, one basin – Andy Racey and Andy Taylor

33 – A new frontier for Nigeria’s stranded associated gas – Chimezie Uduba, Barikorndum Needam, Adedotun Olalere, Chinweike Okeke, Temim Yusuf, Rasak Sunmonu, Kazeem A. Lawal and Segun Owolabi

FEATURES

36 – Unlocking the deep offshore potential of the Mahanadi Basin – Srinivasan Krishnan, Michael Castele, and David Hume, University of Houston / DGH Collaboration

39 – Offshore Algarve Basin geological carbon storage potential – Tiago Cunha, Igi, Hugo Matias, Net4CO2, Martin Neumaier and Nicky Tessen, Arianelogix

42 – Hunting for sands

45 – Before the collapse in oil production, Venezuela saw another collapse – the mass firing of most of PDVSA’s technical staff

PORTRAITS

54 – What words mean

GEOTHERMAL ENERGY

60 – A very expensive fart in the wind

61 – From the shores of Lake Geneva to NEOM in Saudi

62 – If plans come to fruition, the Aarhus geothermal project in Denmark may almost deliver what was promised

SUBSURFACE STORAGE

64 – Silver out, air in

65 – How can we monitor North Sea carbon stores under wind farms and production platforms? – Nigel Platt, Sam Head and John Underhill

66 – “In one year, we lost two years”

DEEP SEA MINERALS

68 – First seabed copper from Norway – by Ronny Setså

69 – Norway stumbles at the finish line – by Ronny Setså

70 – First commercial recovery permit for seabed mining on the horizon

NEW GAS

72 – Omani research well burping hydrogen

73 – Canada’s first hydrogen exploration well

74 – Finding hydrogen is not the problem; producing it is…

TECHNOLOGY

82 – When the reliability of your project depends on a single tool at hundreds of meters depth

83 – Norway’s AlphaGo moment: Why 2025 changed the game – by Dan Austin

84 – “It will make you look like a hero”

Articles

Subsurface noise #7

CORING MUDSTONES A wellsite geologist told me the other day that he was on one of the major oil platforms in the North Sea some years ago, drilling yet another Read More

Omani research well burping hydrogen

When Professor Alexis Temple­ton from the University of Colorado con­ducted a techno-economic analysis on stimulated hydrogen, the results suggested that generating profitable volumes of gas is nearly impossible. Still, she Read More

Not too many, not too few

The Shewashan oil field is located in one of the world’s most famous petroleum prov­inces – the Zagros fold and thrust belt – not far from the major Kirkuk field. Read More

Greenland’s unconformity

This fantastic example of an unconformity, where steeply dipping Devonian strata meet Permian sediments, is exposed on the north side of Wegener Halvø in East Greenland (71° 44 ‘ north). Read More

First seabed copper from Norway

Over the past three years, academia and industry joined forces in the pro­ject EMINENT to in­crease knowledge of the deep sea and demonstrate a full value chain for sus­tainable extraction Read More

Grand plans, challenging geology

Two things came together for bp in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. First, there were significant oil discoveries in Colombia. Then came the Apertura in Venezuela in the Read More

Recognising structural inversion

In structural geology, inversion describes a situation where a fault or structure is reactivated with the opposite sense of movement from its original displacement. The most common type is positive Read More

What words mean

Do we both have the same con­cept in mind when we talk about a 3D model? “No,” says Katya Casey, “surely not.” That notion shaped her career and the style Read More

Hunting for sands

If a school bus driver is instruct­ed to stop the vehicle within a fraction of a meter, there needs to be systematic speed and brake control in place. Otherwise, the Read More

When the lithium cycle bites back

Commodity cycles rarely announce their turn­ing points. They emerge quietly, through inven­tory data, project pipelines, and subtle shifts in physical markets – long before consensus catch­es up. The lithium price Read More

Silver out, air in

Just as Aberdeen in Scotland – where this article was written – is sometimes referred to as the “Silver City”, the village of Bro­ken Hill in southeastern Australia is described Read More

The Black Sea is back

The region took a huge leap forward in 2020 when the Turkish state energy compa­ny Türkiye Petrolleri Anonim Ortaklığı (TPAO) announced the gi­ant Tuna-1 gas discovery in the west­ern basin Read More

A very expensive fart in the wind

Early December last year, Eavor announced the start of electricity production from their Geretsried deep closed-loop project in the south of Germany, near the village of Geretsried. As expected, it Read More