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A seismic facies library

Seismic facies classification can be a tedious process, especially in an exploration context where large areas need to be as­sessed. In order to speed up that process, using a library…

Death by 0.9

During an evening lec­ture organized by the Ge­oscience Energy Society of Great Britain (GESGB) in Aberdeen the other day, a discus­sion unfolded about how to risk play elements in a…

Less is more – uncertainty in rock properties

My last article opened a topic of uncertainty in basin models. Dis­cussion following its publication brought up an interesting research paper describing how in­creasing model complexity increases uncertainty in its…

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“Imagine a world where labour is obsolete”, says Yu-kai Chou at the start of a TEDx Talk delivered for the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 2014.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…

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…

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…