Energy is politics, is community, is pride
My dear friend William invited me last month to Brecon, mid Wales. Another dear friend, Ian, lives in Penarth, just outside Cardiff, south Wales, so it made perfect sense to…
Europe
Wind makes room for gas
It is getting busy in the North Sea. Was the area a monopoly for oil and gas companies when it comes to energy production for decades, in recent years offshore…
Looking at the regional geology of the Wolin-East discovery in Poland
Last month, Central European Petroleum (CEP) announced that its Wolin East-1 (WE1) well in the Baltic Sea in Poland was a significant oil discovery, having been designed to target primarily…
Despite putting the brakes on seabed mineral licensing, the Norwegian government continues to spend ever-increasing amounts on seabed mapping
“We have been busy,” confirmed Hilde Braut, Deputy Director for New Industries at the Norwegian Offshore Directorate (NOD), when she gave a lecture at the Deep Sea Minerals 2025 conference…
Romania – will there finally be a new bid round?
Romania used to be Europe’s stronghold when it comes to oil production. But it’s not anymore today. That’s not because the country has run out of oil or gas; it…
Shaving off costs for geothermal exploration and production
“ Let’s face it,” says Arndt Peterhaensel from TRACS, “with the energy density of geothermal energy being so much lower than from hydrocarbons, the service sector around this resource has…
How advanced seismic inversion and a sound depositional model led to the successful appraisal of an initially uneconomic discovery
Let’s take a step back and look at the structures targeted in the early days of North Sea exploration. It is no surprise that back then, the big fields were…
Extract and re-inject water, from the same well
The city of Munich is blessed with a very permeable succession of Quaternary sediments that enables a high and consistent supply of groundwater flow. As such, there is great potential…
At the start of the next super-cycle or halfway to rock-bottom?
Apart from Norway, the UK Continental Shelf saw the highest number of seismic surveys acquired when looking at a global overview over the past ten years. Is that something to…
The “nugget effect” in geothermal exploration
“We see permeabilities of 10 Darcy and above 15 % porosity, easily,” says Alan Bischoff. Alan is associate professor of geoenergy at the University of Turku in Finland. In that…
Understanding CO2 flow at Sleipner using stratigraphic continuity
The Sleipner project, located offshore Norway, marks one of the first large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) initiatives. Since 1996, more than 18.5 million tons of CO₂ have been injected…
How a recently acquired mining core became a new reference section for the Triassic of the North Sea
In north Yorkshire, United Kingdom, a huge mine is being constructed by AngloAmerican to produce polyhalite from an Upper Permian evaporite succession. In order to design the shafts, a borehole…