Worldwide

Why USGS Yet-to-Find figures are an overestimation

One of the most common ways to estimate YTF is the extrapolation of discovery rates, as can be calculated from a creaming curve. However, this methodology does not have any guidance on discovery size – is it just a single…

Field trips and software don’t mix very well – or do they?

“It was a new thing to us,” says Lilly Walker from RFD when we meet on what is her Wednesday afternoon in Perth, Australia. Lilly is a geologist and joined RFD’s Australia team a little more than a year ago.…

Benchmark your geosteering skills

For geosteering geologists, few experiences can replicate the pressure of making critical decisions while a well is being drilled. The 2026 Geosteering World Cup (GWC’26) puts those skills to the test in a global, competitive environment and gives geologists a…

“Oh, look! Oil everywhere…”

What seems like an oil seep on a rock face, especially from a distance, can equally be the result of chemical weathering. When these types of rock coatings, which can be found across a wide range of settings, are misinterpreted…

Subsurface noise #9

THE REALITY BEHIND PRESS RELEASES Talking to people is still the best way to find out what really happened when a well has been completed. “We drilled hundreds of meters of shale,” an exploration geologist recently told me about an…

Why geology still calls the plays in every energy system

The Earth is not a suggestion box. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t adjust to aspirations. Its rules were written long before we arrived, and they remain in force no matter how many times “crisis” is mentioned in the media. This…

Do we need seabed minerals?

The debate on this topic is fierce. The Metals Company, who are gearing up to harvest polymetallic nodules from the abyssal plain, argue that even though terrestrial deposits can meet demand, the economics of extracting them are less favourable. Seabed…

Many CCS projects may falter quietly without the promised benefits

In a recent special issue of EAGE’s journal First Break, dedicated to underground storage, one finds the usual articles that one would expect for such a publication. But there happened to be one little outlier. Or maybe a slightly larger…

Why dual-phase systems demand a new assessment approach

Various work-arounds at­tempt to compensate for these limitations, but each introduce their own arte­facts. A common approach is to treat gas as a failure by assigning a “gas risk” and evaluating only oil scenarios. An­other merges the risked and success…

What else is hiding in your reservoir brine?

In oil and gas, water is usually treated as a liabili­ty – something to manage, re-inject, or dispose of. But from a geological perspective, produced water is not just a by-product. It is the most mobile part of the system,…

“Reservoir engineering was too boring for me”

“Our industry is back in business,” says Lone Margrethe Olstad enthusiastically when we meet on Teams. And so is AGR, the company she joined four months ago, as it has the ambition to grow the subsurface consultancy, evalu­ations and reserves…

The end of the expat – the end of an era?

First things first, this article is not a reflection of thorough research. It is a reflection of conversations I had recently, combined with some observations on social media. And let’s start with that. A connection on LinkedIn this week shared…