Bill Wilks, Sandy Smith and Paul Taylor travelled to Aberdeen to represent Merlin’s Geoscience Consulting, Datawise and Geochem Divisions at the DEVEX 2022 meeting on 10th & 11th May. This was the 19th DEVEX Conference, which describes itself as the only technical conference of its size to focus on the full E&P project cycle. The theme of this year’s meeting was “Developing the future – Powering the energy transition to 2050.” Over 250 attendees enjoyed a wide-ranging program that covered topics from panel sessions on the future of the North Sea and navigating the energy transition, to technical presentations on the topics such as details of fluid flow in mature reservoirs and optimal well completion designs.
It was fantastic to see old friends & colleagues in person again, to make new contacts and to hear about the latest trends. Here at Merlin, we have been busy developing new offerings and workflows to play our part in the energy transition and to extract the maximum value from mature assets. For example, Sandy was showcasing the new Merlin Keywise software that can extract and organise information from an unstructured collection of files – an issue that we all face and something that can be especially challenging for assets that have documents gathered by multiple operators over decades. Other conversations at the Merlin stand included the application of our CCS experience and the potential for forensic geochemistry to assist well integrity and production monitoring in ways that are cheaper and create lower emissions than more traditional approaches. We came away from the meeting with renewed enthusiasm and optimism about the future, despite the challenges ahead of us all.
