Eyes wide open at the right time
“I took the most jagged path into the oil business, as you can imagine,” says Henry S. Pettingill. “There was nothing for me to identify myself with the oil industry,…
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Getting drill-ready for the energy transition
Frank van Bergen “If you don’t include the subsurface in the journey towards reducing CO2 emissions, it will be impossible to reach net zero”, says Frank van Bergen. Frank heads…
The evolution of managed pressure drilling
Nick Ward “Managed pressure drilling (MPD) has been around for a long time”, says Nick Ward when we meet in his office in Tullos, Aberdeen. Nick oversees the MPD business…
Jevons paradox
The environmental ideology driving the statement, “the sooner hydrocarbons or fossil fuels are gone, the better for the world”, is misguided and misses the fact that to create a positive…
Data fabric architecture – the solution to explore better?
Geologists like visuals. That is why Puneet Saraswat and his colleagues from Querent AI are a step ahead already, because they create visuals, out of large collections of reports. They…
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“Imagine a world where labour is obsolete”, says Yu-kai Chou at the start of a TEDx Talk delivered for the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 2014.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…
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…