Europe

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…

A greenprint for deep sea copper exploration

The Semenov hydrothermal fields along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at 13° N, the same lati­tude as Senegal and Nicaragua, boast the world’s largest known Sea­floor Massive Sulphide (SMS) deposits, with a…

Progress over perfection

The Norwegian continental shelf offers a wealth of opportunities for new industries alongside and after oil, and car­bon capture and storage (CCS) has gained a solid foothold. Northern Lights has…

Layer cake geology and a lack of grid access

A few years ago, I asked a seasoned wellsite geol­ogist about the biggest subsurface surprise she had ever seen over her long career working on rigs. Rather than coming up…

France’s first stimulated natural hydrogen project

Clean hydrogen production from electrolysis remains expensive and difficult to scale, leaving industry without the reliable, affordable supply needed for substantial decarbonisa­tion. Vedra Hydrogen has embarked on a complementary approach:…

Will Greenland be the next oil hotspot?

These days, it is quite common to hear that frontier exploration is a thing of the past. But what is about to happen in Greenland this year should cast some…

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…

Going deeper for salt mining

The Dutch subsurface is well known for its gas resources, hosting the world-famous Groningen field. What is less well known is that there is plen­ty of salt, too. These evaporites…

Where the earth yawns

I first visited Iceland a decade ago. Recently, I returned, courtesy of a European Geothermal Research project, hosted by Reykjavik En­ergy. We learned about heating and electricity production in Iceland,…