The gamification of the oil and gas industry
“Imagine a world where labour is obsolete”, says Yu-kai Chou at the start of a TEDx Talk delivered for the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 2014. “And I’m not…
Worldwide
Static reservoir modelling to transition from POS to POM
Probability Of Success (POS) is the central concept for petroleum exploration. POS is used to predict dry well occurrence, risk an exploration portfolio of prospects and eventually decide what gets…
Horsetail splays, wing cracks, and splay faults
These funny faults go by several names, but traditionally refer to the secondary faults and fractures that develop near the tips of a primary fault. Although these can occur on…
Let’s not play Russian roulette with our energy system
I am not a pessimist, and I don’t like using terms like “energy crisis”, but if we do not start to take our energy system seriously, many industries will leave…
The exploration legacy of Bernard Looney
In a speech delivered to people at Stanford University in March 2002, then bp chief executive Lord John Browne declared that his company needed to reinvent the energy business. “We…
Your “catch of the day” causes plumes and marine devastation at a much larger scale than any deep-sea mining activity will cause anytime soon
In the fourteenth century, British fishermen from Essex sent a petition to King Edward III from England. They wanted him to ban a new type of fishing gear that some…
Is Multi-Point Statistics the future of reservoir modelling?
In our quest to build more realistic reservoir models, we stumble upon the challenge of how to fill up the blanks between well data. Many robust algorithms are widely used…
Finding oil in synclines
This week, I came across the concept of finding oil in synclines on a number of unrelated occasions. It simply shows how diverse geology and exploration are. The first example…
The little big number
“Levelized cost of energy” (LCOE) measures an energy source’s lifetime costs divided by energy output and is a metric often used for comparing the competitiveness of different energy forms to…
Drilling deeper than the primary target – the next frontier?
The idea for this story was born when I saw a LinkedIn post from Mike Smith in the USA in which he wrote about a well in the Gulf of…
Strike-slip kinematics for pop-ups and pull-aparts
Pop-ups and pull-aparts, releasing- and restraining-bends, positive- and negative-flower structures. These are the various names given to the little, and big, structures that develop along strike-slip faults. They often form…
Applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Carbon Capture and Storage Well Design
CFD is used to model the leak rate of CO₂ through abandoned wells and to verify that the leak rates are As Low As Reasonably Possible. The risk of loss…