Another orbit, another ‘sorb it.

Contents:

Another orbit;????? A refection on career;????? Early starts;????? On to hydrocarbons;????? To geothermal;????? The transition distractions;????? Minerals;????? Ophioliting;???? Holistic resource and an energy transition;?????? Difference is the opportunity

Another orbit

Corny title I know, but if we can’t be corny on our birthday, when can we be? Absorbing another year’s life experience, to add to the cumulative pile, comes with mixed feelings often.

Birthdays change in flavour as we get older. Who knew… That’s not to say any cause for celebration and gratitude changes, but the nature of reflections accompanying them tend to. However consciously we try to avoid it, birthdays in our younger years often subconsciously snap into a measure of ambitions against achievements. Have we done what we hoped to by that time?

I can only speak for myself, but birthdays in older years are a bit different. The ambitions have tempered somewhat – not that there aren’t any, but the scale and nature of them evolves into something with far more internal metrics of measurement than external ones.

Perhaps that is a subtle way of saying we care less what others think, and maybe that’s true.? If so, it is not in an arrogant way, suggesting others don’t matter, rather that we have completed enough orbits to know that people-pleasing as a raison d’être is a vain route to contentment. If we have something to contribute to the wellbeing of others, it is likely not in changing who we are to be what others want. We all sort of know that intrinsically, but the reality of it develops more internal steel reinforcing with every passing year.

It would be a lie to pretend that our own mortality doesn’t come into play at such times too. Not in a morbid or depressed kind of way, but just to note that the finiteness of time and the scale of what any one of us is capable of becomes increasingly evident. That in no way diminishes the growth we can experience day on day as individuals. The adventures might change in their physicality a bit, but they are still there.

I do think, if it does not sound trite to say so, that we become more interested in truth as we get older. That is not to pretend truth is an easy concept or that youth ignore it, but the more orbits we complete, the more we recognise how many things haven’t led to it. Sometimes those learnings are something we can only pick up individually through experience. No amount of telling them ever brings it home.

It is always slightly bemusing (and endearing) to hear each young generation repeating various mantras as if they are some new revelation, when the years remind us of how people were saying similar things many decades ago, and what was brought to the table as a result was at times limited in scope.? Not zero but limited. So, we don’t mind hearing the repetition, recognising it is not valueless, and we know only time can educate on such things. Yet, we also temper our own expectations of what much trumpeted new paradigms will bring to a world that chews them up and spits them out regularly.? Somehow it still muddles on and each new generation brings its contribution, but that progress is not to be taken for granted, and is more fitful and strained than we ever realise at first.

A reflection on career

So, another year of life brings so many things to reflect on. Some with a smile and gratitude, some with unresolved pain, some with anger, some with confusion, many with wonder. Such is the human state, and for all the raw and heady mix that these things are, it’s real. We could opt for some fluffy barbie-esque world of everything nice all the time, and I think all of us have those moments when at least a few days without any screw-ups or new problems would be very welcome. Would we want to stay cosseted milk-fed babies for ever though? I wonder. The challenges bring learning, and amidst the trials it is possible to be grateful for that growth, and the movement out of a place - that while perhaps comfortable for a time - was in truth an illusion if we ever imagined it could be permanent.?

Career is a subset of the many things for reflection, yet for many of us, it is an important one. It reflects after all, what we choose to do with a big chunk of the hours in our life.? That is not to pretend we are always in absolute control or are always laden with many choices.? The storms and fair winds that battle that particular ocean are many – but we do at the end of the day get in a boat and choose at some level which way to point it. ?We should not beat ourselves up if we are not joyfully striding into purposeful fulfilment of a job every living day. Life’s not like that. There are those “other” years, where paying the bills dominates.? They are part of the wider evolution and growth just as much as the other ones.

Early starts

My career began out of a fascination as old as I can remember with earthquakes and volcanoes. Not that this is anything unusual - it's something I know many share. My first jobs in NZ engaged in such things – recording earthquakes near and far, including the “teleseisms” - which with their multiple reflections bounding internally around the inside of the planet, tell us so much about the internal structure of the earth. Also, monitoring volcanoes around New Zealand and its Antarctic interests for their seismicity and seeing the mix of events that were constantly occurring, including the bespoke idiosyncrasies of each volcano, and the hums of volcanic tremor in those most active.?

As part of my studies, field work in Marlborough New Zealand, and in Epirus NW Greece, was transformative not just from a career perspective, but in a wider "life" sense. These two areas, both at the transitions from oceanic subductions to continental collisions, imparted a wonder of the grandeur of active earth processes and propelled me headlong into a deeper and permanent fascination with structural geology. Seeing and mapping the active faults in both places, observing the structures, and analysing the paleomagnetic evidence for large scale rotations over time - fueled a long-lasting respect for the dynamism of earth.? That some of those NZ faults moved in 2017, in a complex multi-fault-rupture earthquake, only adding to the sense of wonder and awe, and the reality of an earth in motion.

My first job upon completing all my tertiary studies, took me to the Argentine Andes of South America, pursuing minerals for Rio Tinto, or as they were known as then, RTZ. Though brief, anyone who has visited this region will understand the superlative nature of the geology and the structure in this part of the planet, not least because of its pervasive exposure. The ability to observe active relationships between structural and magmatic tectonic processes, including the actions of geothermal fluids, has few equals.? The host of mineralisation systems this can lead to is too long to list. It left a lasting impression.

To stand atop some of the many ranges which form the Andes, or to look to some of the volcanic peaks which in their blackness contrast against the white of the alpine salars, the rusty redness of weathered barren hills, the yellow-orange of geothermal springs, and the deep blue of a high altitude sky, is also to know that the Andes are just one of so many places in Earth history where geological processes have conspired to provide total stupendousness.

On to hydrocarbons

From the Andes, for reasons of discovering in the power of absence, my wife to be, it was a return to the UK.? There began a 25 year stint in the oil and gas industry.? Initiated by that background in structural geology, and a knowledge of NW Greece where my first efforts were to be focused. It was also thanks to the kindly interventions and persuasions of no small number of people within academia and within the industry, who had come to know me.?

The various companies that trained me throughout those 25 years, I can only remain grateful to.? Though the complexion of our attitudes to hydrocarbons has changed and rightly so, to see what engineering and the scientific analysis can achieve when people work together is a powerful testament to humanity, for all its faults. This time brought witness of the industry’s activities – mostly in North Africa, the Middle East, SE Europe, and NW Europe, onshore and offshore. To witness the scale of resource in places like Libya, Iran, Kuwait, was deeply impactful.? That was contrasted with the pursuit of increasingly hard (e.g. HPHT) and or increasingly small, discoveries in the NW European Atlantic Margin and North Sea.

Hundreds of prospects were evaluated in that time, and I witnessed how hard it is to get such things off the ground, for reasons that vary with every case.? It is in this, that an interest in applying risk to resource quantitatively, with diligent commercial appraisal, become far more interesting to me.? Far more interesting than I ever imagined it would be. It is something I now carry over into any resource I consider. Without leaving that initial fascination with structural geology, and in particular the role of fracture and fault systems in interaction with subsurface fluids. ?When they help and when they don’t.?

This process of increasing commercial awareness also instilled in me the appreciation of how hard it is for anything in mature hydrocarbon provinces to compete with the mammoth resource of the Middle East and North Africa.? Not to say impossible, but hard. So it is with a measure of bemusement when today I hear of people talking about how wrong footed and hampering exploration policies have become in various countries, as if that is the key obstacle.? Believe me I have been looking at the yet to find hydrocarbon potentials of many a country and have been hearing about some of them for as long as I can remember being in the industry. To imagine they will somehow monetise now, with a whole raft of competition, and increasingly sparse, expensive and aging infrastructure that would require either upgrade or replacement, I think ignores those of many decades past who have already tried.? Granted sometimes new technologies come along to help, but such gains are typically now incremental, not transformative.?

This difficulty of new exploration against the vastness of already discovered MENA wealth, is what over the past few decades, has seen many geoscientists leave the industry in NW Europe, including myself.? As exploration has become harder and harder and far more geographically concentrated in various places, the industry’s activities have become far more focused on sustained production and development from existing fields and discoveries.

The industry itself has become far more tightly squeezed. Apart from those national oil companies and their proxies sitting on those huge resources of Russia, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, for all others the costs and energy expended in trying to extract oil and gas has increased significantly. Even as the alternatives to oil and gas increase in number and increase in competitiveness for all sorts of metrics.?? Those metrics which the world cares about are constantly evolving, and the trends with time are not in the industry’s favour.

The numbers of geology jobs around the world directly devoted to resource extraction – oil and gas and mining, are far fewer than we might imagine proportionally within geoscience.? Between 10 and 20% of the total (e.g. https://geo.illinoisstate.edu/academics/why-geology/careers/ ).? Engineering geology, and institutional geology (government, academia, consultancies etc.) comprise far more than we might think. So, one might imagine that the increasing squeeze on oil and gas has limited effect. Yet this is to not realise the scale of profit the oil and gas industry has historically made, and how out of that overflow, so much money has ended up directed towards those institutions, and historically with a keen eye on exploration amongst other things.? For that trend to wane, is having a far weightier impact on those institutions than O&G sector job numbers alone would lead us to suspect. That issue is not going to go away.

To geothermal

On exiting the oil and gas industry as staff and forming my own company, as a consultant, some ongoing hydrocarbon work persisted.? Particularly in fault seal, and fractured reservoir capacities. While fascinating, these activities only served to consolidate that sense that ultimately the competition was hard, even for technically great prospects.? Not just for commercial reasons, but with the growing awareness of the implications of combustive emissions.

For many of us who have worked in the hydrocarbon industry, this is not a new thing, but to be looking for geoscience work outside it, focuses the mind on truly understanding where the future is heading, and where indeed it should head.? Not that any of us can claim to know that exactly, but the implications for exploration geoscientists are profound. In looking at this topic, I made my mind up to not ask the question of what things will continue geoscience, but for what things will the world genuinely want geoscience. Long term. Two very separate and different questions.

As a New Zealander by birth, an easy topic to want to look at was geothermal energy.? That is not to say the topic itself is easy, just recognising the desire to chase it is.? With every passing year the complexity and difference of geothermal to oil and gas resource grows in my mind.? That is not a negative, it is just a recognition that to use it effectively requires some different attitudes and tools. Not wholly so, some things are of course similar, but others are very different, fundamentally so.

?A key aspect of that is the key relationship of geothermal success to flow rate, not just as is commonly assumed temperature. This, with the realisation as a structural and past hydrocarbon geologist, of how much flow-rate can vary on very small scales, in a way that is difficult to resolve from the surface without drilling.? Coupled with the realisation that the energy density of hydrocarbons compared to that of hot water means vastly larger flow rates are required for commerciality.? Also that the structural leg up provided to hydrocarbon exploration by the presence of a high-seeking buoyant phase is not present for geothermal fluids.

My initial interest in geothermal was not, and is not, some belief that it is the cavalry coming over the hill as a kind of energy transition messiah. Rather an awareness that much resource exists in many places around the world, not just those with obvious surface manifestation of volcanoes and hot springs, and has often not really progressed commercially despite that. My initial interest was, and remains, in asking the question, why is that? What is the bust, or busts, that are preventing this, and can that change?? That has been a question that is ongoing even now, with studies directed principally at the UK, southern South America, Southeast Europe, and East Africa – both for external clients and as part of my own R&D.

My view of geothermal today is one of a collection of interesting niches, where careful consideration of resource, risk, and customer needs supplies a useful contribution to an energy transition.? It is tempered by the realisation that the subsurface is always more difficult, including longer to understand, than surface-based options, so that question of why choose it instead of those options always has to have a ready answer.? There are sometimes good answers to that, but it differs for each place and for each customer, and ultimately geothermal energy is not for everyone.? It is impossible to not observe a general rule though, that the shallower useful resource is, the more commercially attractive it is, and the less fraught by various geological issues it is.? There is in that a sacrifice of temperature, but if the flow rate makes up for it, modern heat pump technologies mean that need not be a problem. Lower enthalpy geothermal might not be the energy messiah, but it is on the ascendant.

Sometimes, often, there are better solutions elsewhere. However, to ask the question, could geothermal contribute here, is useful and valuable, and we should not presume on historical conceptions or stereotypes that it can’t. That said, at this stage of my life I am always wary of the oversell. That preoccupation with what will truly work, rather than what will provide more work for geoscientists, is what drives me. At least, that is what I kid myself.

The transition distractions

There are some activities in the geoscience world today, that I regard as mostly distractions, at least at the levels of importance being suggested for them. I say mostly because I do not deny the possibility that there are specific localised occurrences where they can be successful commercially.? Yet I label this section carefully as “transition distractions” because there are some things much trumpeted which I perceive are a distraction in any "at-scale" energy transition context. These are geological CCS, and natural hydrogen.

I do not propose to go into detail here, but suffice to say when we ask ourselves about the scale of what is required for an energy transition away from hydrocarbon/coal combustion, and the costs required, compared against alternatives, the prospects of these avenues ever producing anything truly meaningful at scale, I regard as minute.? Yes, I know the IEA and various others including the EU keep putting out statements of how geological CCS is critical to net zero.? Call me stubborn, call me arrogant, but I am not convinced.? There is too much happening in the world of avoiding combustion altogether for burn and bury to improve in its commercial attractiveness much with time.?

As for natural hydrogen, when you have struggled as long as I have to get various hydrocarbon prospects to work commercially, to get the sniffs that comprise most natural hydrogen production rates into a commercial arena, with or without costly stimulations, strikes me as a forlorn enterprise. There are very real geological learnings from existing “discoveries” that are cause for concern, not encouragement.

For both CCS, and maybe even natural hydrogen, there are instances where very specific juxtaposition of customer and resource might work, and that is all well and good, but that is very different to supposing they are – as oft stated “critical to an energy transition”.? I see little evidence that the alternatives on the table would not for the overwhelming majority of the time be far cheaper and more productive investments. The underestimations of the costs of drilling and overestimating the abilities to inject large quantities of fluids to where we want them to go, to my mind seems common themes.?

I do not begrudge those who provide due diligence in what might be achieved locally via these routes, but in propelling an energy transition I believe their ultimate contribution will be minimal. Where carbon capture and storage has most hope long term, is in design of natural surface based processes, and in halting the destruction of those ones such as already exist.

Natural hydrogen to date has no commercial production except from something very small in Mali. That may yet change, but always in any resource we are interested not in the total amounts resident somewhere, but in what can be accessed commercially, and the manner in which this fails to be realised or communicated by so many is an enduring consternation. A concentration means nothing.? A thimble full of water is 100% water. So what. A production rate does mean something. 10000m3/d of water tells us we have a resource of meaningful size.

Knowing the key numbers by even the most optimistic estimates, as far as I can see, tells the story for both geological CCS and natural hydrogen, and so I look elsewhere. To those who study them, best wishes.

Minerals

It is, after nearly a decade of consultancy now, that ironically I find myself returning to those early roots of participation in the minerals industry. Of all the areas in which the geoscience sector will truly have profound influence on an energy transition, this seems the one most assured of doing so, whatever route or routes the world takes in the future to achieve that transition.

That is not to say it is a gilded path by which any mineral explorationist or company can rub their hands with glee. The pace of advance in the low-carbon energy sector including storage and transmission requirements, is such that the precise commodities of most urgent need vary year on year, and almost month on month – especially as China increasingly ring-fences various minerals it has developed access to and processing of.?? Prices in the sector are notoriously volatile for any one commodity and that throws a spanner in the planning of many a business.?Participating in the sector takes a lot of nerve and a long term perspective, and the smaller a collective is, the harder that is.

Coming with that is an increasing amount of stymied confusion in what to do for both large scale mining companies and the junior sector.? “Business models are broken” is a constantly echoing refrain.? Where large deposits are present, deployment of “business as usual” tactics is often encountering strong community resistance.? Meanwhile every smaller company that has a prospect with the energy transition “flavour of the month” mineral in demand is busily shouting from the rooftops to produce a cacophony of noise that only blurs credibility for the sector as a whole. As for natural hydrogen, concentrations mean little, production rates do.? And digging big deep holes and crushing rock is never cheap, whatever mineral we are after.

Amidst all this, people are trying to reform both large scale and junior sector scale mining operations to tick all manner of boxes that have not seemed required previously. That is not to criticise those new boxes, but it is to observe that understanding how to deal with them, is a work in progress for the sector, to put it mildly.

Coming at the sector as I do, with the experience of various sectors I have to date, I find myself asking, I hope humbly and not arrogantly, what can I bring, what can I add? My answer after some months of pondering, and orbiting around the problem, is to settle on various genetic mineral systems and processes, rather than to focus on a particular commodity. This is for an exploration geoscientist consultant, a sort of research portfolio approach. Rather than focusing on one commodity, understanding the systems that provide many, spreads risk, and enhances the probability that research conducted can be of value.

So much of my career to date has revolved around the interaction of rock structure and fluids, and this is pivotal to most mineral depositional systems. ?The key contrast with geothermal and hydrocarbon exploration is that with those, typically we are looking to understand one or two key processes which have enriched the concentration of the thing we are after, and of course they are liquid/fluid, so on successfully locating, we can drill a hole, and “suck ‘em up”.?

With mineral enrichment, the kinds of concentration that deliver commerciality might not require enrichment from one or two processes, but from several, or many more different processes, successively concentrating the mineral or minerals desired.? Those processes might be magmatic, metasomatic, hydrothermal, diagenetic, metamorphic, sedimentary, or complex mixtures of the above in both space and time.? That makes them harder, it also makes them fascinating.

Then at the end of it, if we actually find something of interesting volume at ore grade, we physically have to dig it out.? Ca-ching ca-ching, not cheap.? Throw roller-coastering commodity prices onto that and it’s a crazy tightrope.? Polymetallic deposits which spread the risk across multiple products are nice if you can find them. Dreams are free, so the saying goes. Yet in thinking about genetic processes, we might not find the precise X marks the spot on the map, but we can narrow down where it is sensible to look for it. Throw into that increasing innovation in the processing routes for many minerals, newer technologies of onshore seismic, remote sensing, and mining extraction, and the options for thinking differently are growing.

Ophioliting

In considering genetic mineral system exploration, it rapidly becomes obvious there are hundreds of different categories to choose from.? Some broad, some narrow.

One afternoon in my field area in Epirus NW Greece, I sat on a hillside, on a Cretaceous carbonate folded in a big anticline on Jurassic and Triassic carbonates and evaporites – the latter forming an efficient decollement in the fold and thrust belt of the inverted Mesozoic Ionian Zone rift. Across from me in a broad valley stood the monolith of the Pindos ophiolite, thrust over a mass of Cretaceous turbidites that once formed a subduction zone's accretionary prism.

That view formed a lasting impression on me, for a piece of ancient oceanic crust to be elevated so high in a Mediterranean mountain chain. It captured so much of what has fascinated me about geoscience throughout the course of my career.? It also resonated with a passion of my dear, now passed supervisor, Alan Smith, who spent much of his own geological career advancing knowledge of ophiolites and their emplacement - at a time when plate tectonics was just getting started, and when these isolated slabs of paleo-ocean crust in continental mountain belts were something of a mystery. Not that all that mystery is gone, much remains.

Ophiolites include not just the magmatic and volcanic elements of the ocean crust, but often also those paleo-deep-sea ocean sediments that sat atop them and have now piggy backed their emplacement in accompaniment. Radiolarite cherts, phosphatic sediments, black shales. Often in various states of metamorphism. ?In an age where seabed mining is being contemplated amidst growing awareness of mineral systems evident there, with all the commercial, legal, and environmental risks that entails - we should not fail to observe that nature has already emplaced some paleo-seabeds onshore for us to explore.?

So, for me, the area of interest is self-evident.?? Ophiolites are home to numerous mineral systems relevant to multiple commodities, and so to understand them as a holistic genetic system, in all their diversity, is a big task, but one that provides a long-lasting security of interest, whatever the short-term ups and downs for any one commodity are.? This in itself is no guarantee of custom for my consultancy, but nothing has that.? What I do recognise is that it is a fascinating subject of interest personally and industrially and a subject of value to research.? Particularly, but not only, from the aspect of how such things could work in a junior mining perspective from smaller deposits. A fascinating if difficult commercial topic that will resonate repeatedly throughout the early 21st century.?

So interesting new directions call for the forthcoming orbit. If I have a concern about practicalities of doing so with the minerals sector, it is that the conference get-together pricing always seems to have another zero attached compared to other sectors.? This limits those I – and I suppose many others - can reasonably attend on an annual budget.? C’est la vie.? That is not however a show-stopper, it just calls for diligence and ingenuity, and conversation seeking through other means.

Holistic resource and an energy transition

As time has gone in on in my career in geoscience, I have become steadily more and more interested in how it interacts with the world’s demands on it from a more holistic energy and resource perspective, and also how it competes with non-geological resource.? This, to an end of understanding where geological options really do provide something better, and also where they don’t.

The science of transition engineering and how to complete an energy transition away from hydrocarbon combustion - in the face of increasingly compelling reasons to do so - is a fundamental aspect of geoscience’s future role, yet one that is strewn with lots of uncertainties, hopes, and potential false trails.? ?We can but embrace that knowing there is no alternative but to do so.?

Difference is the opportunity

Going forward, I know not everyone shares my views, as you will have no doubt discerned if you have gotten this far – but if they interest you, I’m always happy to chat, between digging out papers and preparing reports ??.?

Best,

Dave