North America

Drilling a well to produce nuclear energy

The first time I heard about the company Deep Fission was through a conversation with an operations geologist. He had been working on the first well dedicated to the company’s project in Kansas, USA. It all sounded a bit odd…

Harmonising public data with ground truth

Public production data is the backbone of natural gas market analysis, yet it arrives with a structural delay that few participants fully appreciate. Across 18 producing sub-regions, encompassing the Marcellus, Utica, Haynesville, Eagle Ford, and Permian basins, analysis reveals a…

Oil fault traps in California’s San Joaquin Basin

The San Joaquin Basin (SJB) is one of the world’s most prolific petroleum provinces and contains numerous oil accumulations that owe much of their trapping mechanism to faults. Unlike many light-oil and gas-prone basins where faults commonly degrade trap integrity,…

Investment opportunity: Drill-ready Tethys Prospect – onshore California

The Tethys Prospect is a drill-ready conventional oil exploration and development opportunity located along the oil-prolific west side of the San Joaquin Basin in Kern County, California, with an estimated 20 million barrels of oil recoverable potential (P50). The prospect…

An imperial testing facility

“It was a $37 M donation from Imperial Oil, the largest to an educational institution in Alberta’s history,” says Gerald Desrochers when we meet for the lab tour he invited me to on a Thursday morning in May. Just over…

Spindletop spin-off: Helium storage

Qatar, generally responsible for a third of global helium supply, has had to halt production because the Iran war prohibits export. Storing liquified helium gas at surface is not cost-effective; highly specialised, insulated tanks are needed, and even then, the…

Exploring deep-seated hydrogen fluxes in Nova Scotia

QIMC’s hydrogen exploration campaign focuses on the Cobequid-Chedabucto fault system in Nova Scotia, a crustal-scale fault zone approximately 250 km long and 25 km wide that separates two ancient tectonic landmasses: The Avalon Terrane to the north and the Meguma…

Response to feedback from Mark McClure

Last week, we published the latest contribution from Elliot Yearsley, in which he discusses the lack of published well test data to support the claims made by Fervo about their flagship Cape Station geothermal project. We received feedback on the…

The reservoir will always have its final say

With 500 Megawatts (MW) of plant capacity in construction for their flagship geothermal project at Cape Station, Utah, one might think that Fervo had already answered the questions on the subsurface reservoir and lower-than-advertised well productivity. Unfortunately, this does not…

North Slope leasing, exploration, and development

In November 2025, the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas reported solid participation across its three North Slope regional lease areas. A total of 289 bids were received, includ­ing 273 bids in the core North Slope re­gion, alongside more modest…

Mexico – what’s happening

One of the best ways to learn how an industry is doing is to talk to people when you are actually around. That’s what happened to me in February, when I was in Mexico for a week. Through the conversations…