PETEX 2024 Conference Report

The Petex 2024 conference took place on November 19th and 20th. This is Britain’s main geoscience conference which had traditionally taken place every two years. This conference is the first since 2021 and took place at the Brewery in the City of London, a more compact venue then usual.? I would like to thank the GESGB and the conference convenors for organising an excellent get together.

The last 3 years have been quite challenging in the UK oil and gas patch. The UK is a mature area with relatively high costs. We as an industry have also been facing frankly hostile governments from both parties with the newly elected Labour government banning new exploration licences and increasing taxation.? This political action has resulted in a fall in oil and gas investment and some operators deciding to decommission assets early (for example Apache signalling end of production in the Forties and Beryl fields). However there have been some new opportunities in new energies such as offshore wind and potential new projects in CCUS for which the government has some commitment.

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Keynote Talks

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Dr Jo Bagguley of the NSTA (formerly the Oil and Gas Authority) spoke about the changing role of the UK’s oil and gas regulator which is now also responsible for CCUS and offshore storage of natural gas and hydrogen.

The NSTS’s responsibilities include

·??????? Regulating petroleum operations for energy security

·??????? Reducing emissions from operations

·??????? Accelerating the energy transition

The UK upstream petroleum sector contributes over $15 billion in taxes, supports over 200,000 highly skilled jobs and a world class supply chain that has supported Exploration and production globally. This is at risk with possible loss of skills and flight of capital unless Britain can make a case for new investment. The UK also needs to improve its performance on emissions from upstream activities (scope 1 and scope 2), about 3% of Britain’s GHG emissions are due to oil and gas activity and our operators need to reduce these, by platform electrification, reducing flaring further and stopping fugitive methane.

The UK will continue to need both oil and gas for the foreseeable future into the latter half of this century and meeting as much of this demand from British sources would greatly benefit this country

The recent Carbon Capture and storage round has granted 21 licences from 12 operators and there are now 27 active CCS licences. Two projects; Hyvent in the Irish Sea and the Teesside cluster are approaching FID with more to come.

Another role for the NSTA is helping to coordinate activity in what is now becoming a crowded space with multiple government agencies supervising offshore wind, conventional E&P, CCUS, Gas storage, Power Cables and pipelines, as well as other users of the sea such as fisheries , defence and commercial shipping

Mark Llamas of LAB Energy Advisors spoke about capital markets and upstream.

Funding for independent and junior E&P has significantly reduced since before the 2008 financial crisis. Exploration is a capital-intensive business and development even more so, many start up companies relied on funding from the capital markets and this is now harder to access particularly for riskier frontier exploration. New money from private equity and royalty trusts can however reach proven successful exploration teams. Mark showed examples from Rhino in Namibia (Frontier exploration) and ADX in Austria (onshore mature production).

Wadii El Karkouri of TGS spoke about the role of new technologies in leveraging data from a seismic contractor’s perspective. TGS has recently merged with another large contractor, PGS and now has ownership of 65% of the worlds multi-client seismic data. Much of this data is being improved with new processing and better imaging. Data is also being repurposed for new energy industries such as offshore wind. This process is being enabled by cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as well as research collaboration with operators, both Major Oil Companies and National Oil Companies. Cloud computing and satellites such as Starlink have enabled faster turn round for processing seismic data. Velocity models are now also being built much faster than before. Ai is helping leverage the extensive data library for new products. However new energies clients are more financially constrained than oil companies.

Professor Christopher Jackson of WSP, a great science communicator spoke about Geoscience and Society, Chris has appeared in many TV documentaries and is very active in the media promoting Earth Sciences. Earth Science has been out of sight – out of mind for many people and we as a profession and community have not been good at explaining what we do and how we contribute to the world. People tend to hold beliefs and value trust in the messenger, particularly when the message is about a complex topic, for example virology during the Covid pandemic. Chris used examples from public perceptions of nuclear power where some countries are for, and others virulently opposed. There are also different perspectives within populations depending on age, gender and particularly ideology/politics. People trust independent scientists & academics more than industry scientists and much more than politicians. The way scientists communicate has not been good with a traditional approach which just does not work in getting messages across and we would be better starting with the bottom line and giving details later rather than the traditional hypothesis >method>results>conclusions linear reporting. Chris felt that we had much to learn from social sciences in this regard. I agree with Chris about ideological bias being a problem for rational discussion, for example I believe that that in Britain right wing people are in favour of fracking while left wingers want a total ban, I feel that people can tend to go with their ideological side on many topics rather than trying to look at the evidence.

Dr Steven Rogers of Keele University, spoke about perceptions of geology in Britain. Geoscience courses in British universities have seen declining numbers of new students and according to a Geological society survey geologists are seen as beardy old blokes hitting rocks with hammers. There are also potential cultural barriers such as a beer culture and extensive field work which will be challenging for disabled people with mobility problems. There are also perceptions of a poor jobs market with a link to extractive industries such as oil and mining which are seen as dirty by many young people.? There is also a perception of a lack of diversity

As somebody who has worked in geology for my professional life these perceptions could not be more wrong. I have solved complex problems, using great technology, with wonderful people from all over the world, what is there not to like. However, many folks are just not aware.

Steven spoke about the large number of new students going to study forensic science and he felt that this may have been due to the CSI effect, when popular TV dramas such as CSI and silent witness show forensic scientists solving complex cases. However forensic jobs in Britain are limited and many graduates are disappointed. Steven also spoke about the perception that geologists have limited transferrable skills and have this is not true. I agree with him and have a video on this subject (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7ZFIXwKF0I? - about 5 minutes)

?Highlight Talks

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Highlight talks included:

·??????? Mike Cooper of Trove speaking about comparing two of the great new petroleum provinces Guyana and Namibia (please check out Mike’s YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@TROVE-1stSubsurface)

·??????Gavin Elliott of Genel – looking at Petroleum potential in Morocco, a country with a large passive margin along its Atlantic coast and favourable fiscal terms and several potential plays. ?

·???????Simon Gozzard of Veridien (formerly CGG) about using regional scale 3D data to develop new plays in the shelfal area of Suriname

·??????? Oystein Korsmo of TGS speaking about using Visco-acoustic multi parameter Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) to obtain greater imaging resolution

·??????? Claudia Botondi of Veridien spoke about using high resolution elastic FWI for imaging beneath shallow rugose high velocity chalk in the Buzzard area of the Moray Firth, North Sea.

·??????? Matthew Hart of TGS spoke about using FWI for sub basalt imaging in the Norwegian sea. Early tertiary basalts for a barrier for seismic imaging along the NW European Atlantic Margin and new imaging techniques are begging to resolve this problem

·??????? Joseph Nicholson of Osokey technologies gave an excellent talk about how Osokey is using cloud computing to enable easier access to data from the UK National Data Repository (NDR). Operators in the UK have to supply their data to the NDR which becomes non-exclusive and available to all after a period of several years. Osokey’s technology enables online browsing including viewing data samples without needing to download an entire seismic survey. Live cloud storage of seismic data also reduces risk of storing data on obsolete tape systems. ?Several petabytes of data are now available live for the benefit of operators, contractors, consultants and new energy companies such as onshore wind. - please contact Osokey for details.

·??????? ?Katherine Howell of KTG consulting gave a fascinating talk on analysing repurposing the Rough gas storage field on the Southern Gas Basin, Operated by Centrica, ?for storing hydrogen instead of natural gas (Methane), This work involved building a new reservoir geological model ( not it is not a simple aeolian Rotliegend sand tank as previously thought, but a mixture of sheetfloods and conglomerates). Hydrogen is also a different molecule to methane being far smaller and more chemically reactive and the KTG team built several sector models for predicting hydrogen flow behaviour. Their work indicates that storing hydrogen in Rough is possible but does have challenges including hydrogen cooling the reservoir locally die to the reverse Joule Thompson effect, exposing the reservoir to risk from bacteria growth.

·??????? Dave Moseley of Welligence spoke about the challenges of E&P in a net zero world in the UK. The UK has produced 28 Billion Barrels of oil and 17 BOE of gas since the 1960’s, About 4 billion BOE of commercial reserves and potentially commercial resource remain. Production peaked in 2000 and has declined since then, with UK gas set to decline further in the next five years and our main overseas supplier, Norway set to follow soon. ?The UK is particularly vulnerable to a gas shock due to limited gas storage capacity compared to our European neighbours (12 days in the UK !!! vs over 100 days in many continental countries). UK gas demand is set to be met more by imported LNG which has a much higher scope 1&2 emissions footprint than UK or Norwegian gas (80 plus kg CO2/boe for LNG vs 5 to 10 kg CO2 per Boe for North Sea gas). The political climate in Britain will lead to early decommissioning of fields such as the decision by Apache to close Forties and Beryl early leaving 100 million Boe of recoverable hydrocarbons in the ground.

·??????? Jamie Collard of Westwood spoke about worldwide high impact exploration in 2024. Westwood energy consultants define high impact as wells targeting a prospect with over 100 million BOE recoverable resource or opening a new play. ?Succes has been patchy with new discoveries in Namibia, Mexico and offshore Kuwait but disappointments in Guyana, ?Gulf of Mexico, Guinea Bissau, Nova Scotia , Canada ?and offshore Argentina. Several of the disappointments have happened in prospects with apparent seismic DHIs which did not work. Looking further back there has been a decline in high impact wells from about 120mto 150per year before 2014 to about 60 to 70 now. About 14 billion Boe was discovered by high impact wells in 2019 but only 4 billion barrels in 2023. Africa has been a leader in the number of high impact wells and NW Europe a particular laggard and frontier wells comprise about 20% of the high impact wells. Technical success rates have dropped from about 50 % to about 36% with about ? to 1/5 of wells finding commercial hydrocarbons. About 80 high impact exploration wells are scheduled for 2025.

·??????? Colin Percival of Athena Exploration spoke about exploring for gas in the West of Shetland basin. This area is Britain’s last frontier and has significant yet to find. British produced gas has significantly lower scope 1&2 emissions than imported LNG. Due to a lack of infrastructure gas was seen as a nuisance and operators focussed on oil. There are several prospects with apparent DHI and AVO anomalies which merit serious investigation

·??????? Andres Mesa of Holt and Ian Cross of Moyes & Co spoke about the petroleum potential of South America and SE Asia respectively. Both are energy hungry regions which are rapidly developing and are looking for outside companies to help develop indigenous resources. They outline numerous opportunities in these areas

·??????? Emily Kay of TGS spoke about new depth migrated imaging of mobile shale in the offshore Niger Delta Nigeria. It was fascinating to see how much imaging has advanced in an area I worked on 14 years ago

·??????? Neil Hurst of TGS spoke about how new and reprocessed seismic data revealing exploration potential in eastern Sabah Malaysia. Several basins had been overlooked after early disappointment, but modern data and new ideas may lead to new hydrocarbons

·??????? Olga Litvyakova of Shearwater spoke about how building state of the art velocity models using FWI can transform geological understanding of a basin, in this case Namibia. New depth domain imaging leads to a significant leap in understanding geology and reducing risk.

·??????? Tom Cafferkey of Deltic Energy ?spoke about how modern depth conversion can uncover a promising structure in the recently discovered Selene field in the Southern Gas basin. This is an area with a complex overburden which has unusually behaved velocities due to initial deep burial and subsequent inversion and uplift (meaning the usual velocity functions do not work here). Using seismic velocities to build an advanced velocity model led to understanding very complex geology – Tom has subsequently published his work here - https://www.lyellcollection.org/doi/full/10.1144/egc1-2024-1

·??????? Verity Agar of TGS Spoke about a large project that TGS have done in integrating a vast volume of 2D data , reprocessing this data to produce a pseudo 3D volume covering the east coast of India, an area of 500,000 km sq. A new integrated stratigraphic framework based on sequence stratigraphy was also created.

This work enabled a consistent data set for play fairway evaluation, amplitude mapping to identify potential reservoir fairways and a consistent structural model to focus future exploration efforts

·??????? Gavin Ward of RISC advisory gave a talk about common mistakes in mapping the subsurface, where people push interpretations beyond where they really can justify with the data they have or make basic mistakes in contouring (which is particularly easy to do in sparse data areas using automated machine contouring). Gavin explained a few quick, basic techniques to spot common pitfalls and the need for pen peer review and assistance in finding inconsistencies early

Summary

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An excellent conference with many fascinating talks. Despite the headwinds we are progressing through new ideas, new technologies, new people (and old people learning new things). The GESGB who are celebrating their diamond anniversary this year is moving towards adding new energies to our existing hydrocarbon focus. The GESGB is organising the CCUS symposium on 17th December and we have more events planned in the new year aimed at broadening and deepening the knowledge of the geoscience profession. It was also good to see the future in the shape of Geoscience students from the university of Manchester (and others) at this event. Humanity needs geoscience and hopefully these folks (and others around the globe) will meet this requirement