It’s always difficult to pick which conferences to attend. There are so many offerings out there, especially with both traditional and transitional energy themes, that we wouldn’t get any work done if we attended them all!
We have been very pleased this month to attend both the Geological Societies CO2 Storage Efficiency conference, and the GESGB Africa conference. As well as the learnings from both conferences, the chance to catch up with industry colleagues was very much enjoyed.
The Geol Soc CCS conference provided an impressive range of talks on the practical considerations pertaining to storage efficiency. The conference was very well attended, and it was great to see so many representatives from across the Atlantic as well as Norway and the rest of Europe. There was a lot of discussion around the urgent need to find a simple yet effective means of communicating the linkage between potential storage volumes and technical maturity of various sites to non-technical stakeholders, such as investors or policymakers. This is something the traditional oil and gas industry has always struggled with and hopefully, by prioritising communication from the outset, CCS might be able to learn from these mistakes.
The following week Helen Bone and Bill Wilks made their way down to the Oval for the first GESGB Africa conference since the pandemic. With papers covering both traditional oil and gas, hydrogen exploration, geothermal and carbon storage, the full range of energy solutions was represented. A general air of positivity hung over the conference with the need recognised for a considered energy transition, in which continued hydrocarbon exploration is combined with transition solutions. One thing which was sadly missing from the conference however, was the presence of local African companies, with the majority of attendees being UK and Europe based.
The presentations throughout the two days highlighted the work going on throughout Africa, with a number covering the recent play opening discoveries in Namibia. Merlin’s presentation focused very much on the other end of the scale, looking at how to optimise recovery from existing fields. This follows the work we carried out for Damas Petrochemicals and Refinery Limited, in conjunction with Belltree Limited, where we used our “locate the remaining oil” work flow to optimise a re-development plan for their Obe field.
Thanks go to the GESGB for all the effort they made to arrange the conference.
Where next?
Our Principal Stratigrapher, Phil Copestake, will be presenting “Updated Jurassic sequence stratigraphic understanding for the North Sea Jurassic and cross border exploration implications between Norway and the UK” at the Force Cross Border seminar in Norway 25-26th October.
Later in the year our Junior Geoscientist, Georgina Lockham, will be highlighting our ARC GIS work, presenting about our use of GIS to enhance “The Standard Stratigraphic Nomenclature of Offshore Ireland: An Integrated Lithostratigraphic, Biostratigraphic and Sequence Stratigraphic Framework” publication at the ESRI European Energy Resources GIS Conference in November.
