The geoscience of decommissioning
“ Let’s not try to sugarcoat it, it wasn’t always easy”, she continues. “The pandemic unfolded, and taking care of homeschooling, a full-time job and completing the university modules on…
Europe
Time-lapse gravity
Monitoring strategies for offshore Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) cannot simply replicate those used in the oil and gas industry, which often rely on 4D seismic methods. Regulations mandate monitoring…
Geothermal energy from buried basement rocks
Closed-loop shallow geothermal boreholes drilled up to a depth of around 200 m are quite common in Estonia. But recently, the Geological Survey decided to embark on a project to…
With ‘real-time’ reservoir management now within reach, energy companies are seeing they simply have no choice but to adapt to the growing technology landscape
Basemap: Location of the UKCS 3D Seismic Merge – Central North Sea (polygon) with an associated High Definition Frequency Decomposition RGB colour blend along time slice 1960 ms. Why the…
The cream of the outcrop
This panorama shows an Upper Miocene succession, la Rambla de Lanujar, in the Betic Cordillera, featuring in one of our field trips to Tabernas, Almería, Spain. Apart from being a…
How the winner of a technology competition made room for the losers to take over the market
Sweden comes third in the list of countries using geothermal energy. But it is not deep geothermal energy, it is shallow geothermal – mostly sourced through closed loop systems of…
Exploring for gas – for the first time
“We have practically never looked for gas in the Barents Sea. All exploration wells have had oil as their target, and all discoveries of gas have been accidental”, said Dag…
“A poor site that fails to meet the criteria for safe subsurface storage”
Onshore seismic is always more of a challenge to interpret than marine seismic data, and the seismic lines from the area around Cousland to the southeast of Edinburgh that Malcolm…
How careful core description and detailed biostratigraphic analysis can delineate sub-seismic reservoir zones in a highly mud-prone system
This study was undertaken by PetroStrat in collaboration with Stratum AS (QEMSCAN), Barnwell Parker Geoscience Limited (seismic interpretation) and HM Research Associates (heavy mineral provenance analysis). Together, we have completed…
The East Med – still the game changer it was branded as?
The discoveries of the giant Tamar and Leviathan gas fields offshore Israel in 2009 and 2010 respectively were hailed as two of the largest finds of the decade. As such,…
Shallow geothermal in Sweden – A deep penetration in the geo-energy market
The top three countries in terms of geothermal energy production are China, the US and Sweden. In total, these countries produced around 200 TWh in 2020. Of that figure, ground-source…
A geomechanics approach for natural fracture prediction
Natural fractures can provide the essential permeability in hydrocarbon and geothermal reservoirs. However, they exist in the sub-seismic domain and although they can be detected by well logs and cores,…