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1 week ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
This in what a team of researchers concluded in a paper published in the journal Geothermics this year. It must have been a bit of a surprise to find very modest heat flows and no sign of an active geothermal system at all, despite a thick succession of basalts. It wasn’t the oldest basalts either. The team drilled a total of three wells to a depth of 1,000 m.
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1 week ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
Red city of Abyaneh in Iran near Isfahan. Photography: pop_gino via Adobe Stock. It is easy to focus on the oil and gas exploration hotspots of the world, where news around discoveries or the completion of a dry hole is guaranteed for attention from those following the industry. But what about areas that do not feature in the news that much? Iran is one of those countries you normally don’t hear a lot from.
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3 weeks ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
If I fail to hear back from companies when enquiring for information about a project, I mostly decide not to write about it at all. But in the case of Eavor, I think it is worth dedicating a piece to it. An article in the Merkur newspaper in Germany namely suggested that changes had been made to the drilling program, but details were not disclosedFirst of all, we asked the drilling company involved, KCA Deutag, if they could share some information about the project.
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3 weeks ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
“The times of gurus telling younger staff how to plough through a seismic volume and what to interpret is over,” says Herman van Nieuwoudt from Bluware. Herman started as the company’s President in November last year, after a long career mainly with Baker Hughes in which he spent time in numerous countries across the world. “With the current advance of how specialists can interact with interpretation software, such as the InteractivAI tool we have been developing, everybody can do the job quickly.
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3 weeks ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
The Munich area in Germany is lucky when it comes to its geothermal potential. There is a good Upper Jurassic carbonate reservoir at the right depth, and the water composition is also favourable when it comes to scaling and corrosion. “However, even though we don’t have the same challenges with scaling as projects have elsewhere, we still face them,” says Benedikt Broda from Stadtwerke München (SWM).
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1 month ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
“Let’s get this straight,” Benoît Matha says at the start of our conversation on a Friday morning in February, “the subsurface upstream business is not a big data environment.” It is one of the insights that comes with having worked in other sectors, as Benoît did before he joined Eliis five years ago. “In retail, huge amounts of data are being generated; seismic and well data are definitely not big data, also because of the secrecy that is so often associated with it,” he says.
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1 month ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
A few months ago, I published some thoughts on how Norway has proven to be such a hotspot when it comes to new subsurface technology. Dan Austin, who has been in Norway for quite a few years, got in touch and offered to share some of his experience working in subsurface tech in Norway. Dan previously worked with Earth Science Analytics in the seismic and artificial intelligence space and is now powering autonomous drilling with Sekal.
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1 month ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
In Geothermal energy production, it is all about the temperature of the produced water, brine or steam. A drop in temperature has a direct effect on the amount of energy that can be extracted. The timing of thermal breakthrough in a geothermal project depends on a few factors.
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1 month ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
At times of better access to digital outcrop imagery, drone footage and satellite shots, is it still worth going into the field to have a look at the rocks in person? Universities offering geoscience degrees may have already concluded that it’s not, given that students spend less time in the field than a few decades ago. But is this a good call? Would it not be better to beat the elements, struggle with scale, and being forced to think 3D whilst comparing scarce outcrops? Yes, is the answer.
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1 month ago | 
geoexpro.com | Marzena Pyteraf |Henk Kombrink
Basement plays are found in quite a few areas globally and have been well studied and reported on. Norway, Yemen, Vietnam and China are amongst those places where oil is being produced from granites buried beneath source and overburden rocks. In all these cases, it is either fractures or a granite wash resulting from extensive subaerial weathering that is behind the formation of reservoir potential.
