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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…

Oil-water contacts don’t exist

Steve’s argument goes back to a challenge set by the London Petrophysical Society. They invited petrophysicists to derive a function describing how water saturation varies with depth. Most responses followed the traditional route, searching for increasingly complex saturation vs. height…

The basement tapes

“You’re the only company that tells us where their model could be wrong.” It is an observation that Phil and Tim have had from clients when presenting the latest version of their Global SEEBASE® basement model. “We are open about…

Is your data NDR compliant?

Good subsurface data has never been more valuable. From oil and gas exploration to carbon storage and offshore wind positioning, geological characterisation is essential, yet new data acquisition is becoming increas­ingly expensive. The case for reusing legacy datasets is clear.…

The CCS parallel universe

Sometimes, I cannot prevent the feeling that the CO2 storage business is not so much about putting CO2 in the ground, but rather to keep an en­tire academic research community, a conference industry, and a contingent of geoscientists in a…