Shallow geothermal drilling is not without risk
It is not every day that geological expertise is brought to the Supreme Court. Late last year, Norway’s highest court dealt with a claim for compensation for subsidence damage to…
North West Europe
Large licence turnover, but what’s the value added?
There has been significant coverage in the news about the latest UK licensing round. To backtrack, the 33rd Offshore Licensing Round officially opened on 7 October 2022 with applications closing…
The deepest closed-loop borehole drilled in the UK
This is not the first time I write this, but I keep on saying it. If there is any sector in the geothermal drilling space that is active in the…
The sequel: The hunt for Buzzard II continues
The prospect is located in the Peterhead Graben, a sub-basin in the geographically more extensive ‘South Halibut Basin’, home to numerous Upper Jurassic fields and discoveries of which the giant…
Are National Oil Companies the answer to addressing security of supply concerns across the North Sea?
“Many countries in the West have deliberately moved from being carnivores to vegans if that analogy can be used for the energy system”, someone recently told me at a conference.…
A geologists’ paradise
The hotel kindly hosting the Aberdeen evening lectures organised by the GESGB should have looked at the programme before deciding not to man the bar last night. The talk was…
Increase risk!
“Have we run out of new ideas?”, asked Kjersti Dahle from the Norwegian Offshore Directorate (NOD) rhetorically during her keynote speech at the NCS Exploration Strategy conference in Stavanger last…
Mineral resource estimates for Nordic waters expose different lines of thinking between major Norwegian institutions
A debate has recently unfolded around how much copper – and related metals – are present in Norway’s mid-oceanic ridge system, an area where mining could take place in the…
“In this case, we’d rather find the smallest prospect”
In the continued discussion around the poor state of exploration drilling in the UK versus all those wells that are being drilled in Norwegian waters, it is so easy to…
A puncture in a geothermal seal
More than fifteen years ago, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) was one of the first institutions in the Netherlands to come up with the idea to warm their premises…
“We should have looked at that regional seismic line with more care before signing off on a plan for drilling”
We, geologists, have the primacy of observation of rocks dinned into us during our earliest work in the field, with that message then reinforced by later events in our lives.…
Wind and solar energy – temporarily stored in a salt cavern
One of the major challenges for the energy transition is the storage of excess energy that can be used at times when the wind does not blow or the sun…