David Bamford's Page

To pursue a theme I have mentioned before, I have been on many team-building courses in my career but have noticed that teamwork in our industry – where there are many distinct disciplines that must contribute to an exploration venture, a field development project, a ‘debottlenecking’ exercise or a field resurrecti

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I spent an hour of the holidays scouring the dictionary for words that summarised my thoughts about the day rates that are currently being paid for deep water drilling rigs – ‘usury’, ‘exploitative’ came to mind. However, nobody reads these blogs of mine (of course that phrase itself may be true!) to be confronted

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As I mentioned in a previous blog, the cost of onshore seismic can be an order of magnitude more than that of offshore seismic. One of the reasons for this is that a typical onshore survey consists of thousands of geophones, connected in ‘groups’ by cable, with these ‘groups’ ultimately connected by cable to the re

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Textbooks, MSc courses and proponents have long argued the case for potential field, i.e. gravity and magnetic, techniques as a reconnaissance oil & gas exploration tool, especially the air-borne versions. Unfortunately, I think it’s the experience of explorers that the promise is almost never fulfilled, the lack of resolution and the interpretation ambiguities not at all being compensated for by the cheapness (and what does magnetic susceptibility have to do with petroleum anyway!).

Until… Continue

Beginning in the mid 1990’s, the advent of regional or ‘exploration’ 3D, at extraordinarily low unit cost, enabled us to explore offshore in a very precise way; for example, the whole of the Angola Deep Water blocks 15, 16, 17 and 18 – an area of 20,000 sq kms plus – is swathed in such 3D, and this is direct enabler of the high exploration success rates enjoyed by ExxonMobil, Total and BP.

We find ourselves presented with a different problem when exploring onshore. Consider for example East Sib… Continue