BP discovered $2 billion worth of oil hidden in the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, BP.

[corbe]

BP discovered $2 billion worth of oil hidden in the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, BP.
by Circa News
April 27, 2017


BP has found a hidden treasure trove of oil in the Gulf of Mexico thanks to a supercomputer that allowed to see beneath a rock formation that stumped oil experts for years.

The oil is believed to amount to about 200 million barrels and contains about $2 billion in recoverable oil. The formation is about 150 miles off the coast of New Orleans, the Houston Chronicle reports.

The imaging technology could save oil companies hundreds of millions of dollars, since they can avoid "false starts" and drill where oil actually is.

Finding a way to get around salt formations has long been a "holy grail" for oil drillers, Ed Hirs, energy fellow at the University of Houston said.

To find oil underwater, companies like BP typically rely on seismic imaging, which would send seismic waves into the ocean and measure how the waves are distorted after bouncing off the rocky floor. But salt doesn't send waves back so much as refract them, leading to what BP geophysicist calls "a bunch of scrambled nonsense," and the companies can either drill randomly to try and find oil or move on.

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http://circa.com/circa-now/happening/bp-discovered-2-billion-worth-of-oil-hidden-in-the-gulf-of-mexico

[thackney]

Salt domes have stumped scientists for years. Such geology in deep water is usually promising because the formations trap oil and gas in underground pockets for easy extraction. But companies hadn’t been able to image under the domes with much clarity.

Scientists at the BP’s Energy Corridor office park worked for years to improve subsea imaging under salt domes and identify new oil deposits. Then, last year a BP scientist fresh out of out of graduate school asked his bosses if he could borrow the company’s 15,000-square-foot supercomputer to run an algorithm he had developed.

Xukai Shen wanted to use the machine for two weeks. And in that time he and his team produced a new image with much more detail of the earth layers under Atlantis.  Via traditional methods, such analysis would require at least a year of painstaking data comparison for geophysicists. Shen and his team did it in little more than two weeks, and created a much more accurate model.

“It produced the best image of the field we’ve ever seen,” said Etgen, the project’s principal researcher. “We basically fell out of our chairs.”

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2017/04/27/bp-finds-hidden-trove-of-oil-in-gulf-of-mexico-via-new-subsea-imaging/

[IsailedawayfromFR]

A few notes on the article.

- Seismic imaging is nothing new and has been around since the 1920s.  This technology has led to most of the discoveries of oil and gas found to date.

- Advances in the almost 100 years since that time have been in the applications of this technology and refinement in it.  Examples include three dimensional seismic and utilizing the power of supercomputers.

- The exploration of the fields more recently in the Gulf of Mexico do not contain salt domes but salt sheets that can be quite thick.  Salt domes typically push up the formation beds to form inclined structures that oil and gas become trapped against or at times can be beneath lips of the dome.  Salt sheets and can be thought of as just a layer of salt which moves to form structures that can be quite large.  Discoveries like Atlantis were made exploiting the oil and gas structures around the salt sheet, but not those below it due to seismic interpretation difficulties.  It is the imaging of oil and gas beneath the salt sheets which is the substance of most of the article.

- Imaging of the formations beneath salt sheets has been made for the past +25 years, and is gradually improving all the time.

- The article says that the new oil discoveries around a field like Atlantis are 'unexpected'.  My experience is that one should expect more oil from larger fields.  The adage is always true that one can 'find more oil where it has been found before', and large fields are almost certain to grow larger over time.

The bottom line of all this coming from an old industry hand: likely nothing new going on here, but just looking at things differently.