“Playtime is over”
“A lovely little department dedicated to geothermal energy. That’s what I found when I started at the International Geothermal Association (IGA) in 2017,” says Marit Brommer, who had left a…
Worldwide
A cool vitrinite reflectance model
A basin model describes the thermal evolution of a basin to estimate when its source rocks expel hydrocarbons and of what type. Basin models do so by evaluating a number…
Leap whole workflows in a single bound with DUG Elastic MP-FWI Imaging
DUG Elastic MP-FWI Imaging is a unique approach to seismic processing and imaging which turns the traditional paradigm on its head. It replaces not only traditional processing and imaging workflows,…
Storing radwaste: From academic pipe dreams to more practical ideas
The history of radioactive waste disposal is probably one of the best examples of how subsurface projects evolve. Starting in the 1950s, the spectrum of project ideas was broad-ranging, from…
Creating a source rock and storing it for good
“We started as a project when Swiss supermarket concern Migros wanted to find a solution to process its food waste in a carbon-neutral way,” says geologist Tim Baars from Recoal.…
The E&P industry of the future
An industry in transition or transformation? The upstream E&P sector has faced challenges over the last decade, including a downturn, the energy transition, and COVID-19. The industry is resilient but…
Maybe the energy sector does not need so many new geoscientists after all?
There was an outcry when the Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, recently announced its intention to close its geoscience department. Many well-respected geoscientists posted on LinkedIn how bad this…
Estimates of trapped hydrogen globally – a reality check
Over the last few years, there has been a continuous stream of news coverage on “ground-breaking natural-hydrogen discoveries.” A paper by Ellis and Gelman, published late last year, very much…
Why the term “fault block” is a useless way to describe a trap
In most prospective basins, the simpler and larger anticlines and high-side fault blocks have mostly been drilled. In order to find what is remaining, explorers can look for new trap…
Fresh water in deep-marine sandstones – how come?
“A famous example of anchoring is finding a high resistivity anomaly on a structure in a deep-water turbidite play and assuming it can only be petroleum related,” wrote exploration geologist…
Evaluating the uncertainty in a Saturation Height model
Even the ‘ground truth’ of core data is uncertain when you really think about it. There is nothing better than a lump of rock to look at, touch, smell, or…
Deciphering Earth’s secrets
Faults on geological maps are far more than just lines; they are a critical form of communication, conveying essential information about the Earth’s subsurface structure and tectonic history. Central to…