Welcome by the Local Chair

With gas and advantaged oil continuing to underpin evolving energy portfolios for decades to come and the need for carbon storage rising, coupled with growing footprints in renewable energy such as wind and geothermal, the need for subsurface talent will remain strong.

EAGE GeoTech 2022 plans to bring together a diverse audience of experts to focus on key challenges across the subsurface domain. This year’s workshops will seek to address how we optimise our maturing fields, advance the dial in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and explore the role of fibre in monitoring and verification.

To remain competitive in maturing our fields where value is at the heart of the investment decision, we will need to become truly predictive about our reservoirs, while constantly monitoring and optimising their performance. This through deeply integrating our workflows helped by digital solutions to reduce cycle time, explore alternative interpretations, quantify uncertainty, and drive data insights, further enabled by quality affordable seismic. 

In our approach to storing CO2 safely and permanently, as either a service or in the context of Hydrogen production and/or carbon trading, we will benefit in our quest for stores from the rigour and knowledge already established in managing oil & gas reservoirs, while expanding our knowledge and impact to the overburden. The conventional subsurface disciplines will need to flex to incorporate disciplines traditionally seen as niche: overburden geohazards, hydrogeology, geomechanics and geochemistry to name some. Integration of data and toolkit to incorporate all facets from reservoir to surface is highly desirable and approach to containment and risk evaluation will need to factor the long term. Significant innovation is still required on how we effectively verify and monitor the CO2 stored in place with solutions other than seismic as current 4D seismic solutions may prove too costly. At the same time, regulators will need to be clear on what is expected in terms of measuring, monitoring and verification, while the industry needs to educate regulators on the technical possibilities and limitations subsurface technologies have. 

And is there a role for fibre? Sand monitoring distributed acoustic sensing and permanent seismic monitoring are but some of the applications in which we see fibre profiling itself as a key subsurface technology. 

Furthermore, to meet the challenge of the energy transition, we will need to partner and collaborate extensively with and across industry to drive efficiency, innovation and automation across Subsurface and its disciplines. We will need to dare challenge existing commercial and business models while remaining respectful of tax and government regulations.

The EAGE GeoTech Conference and Exhibition offers a fantastic opportunity for the subsurface community to meet and exchange views and best practices. The different programmes are brought together to encourage cross-discipline pollination and create a forum for discussion and collaboration on how to best address some of the challenges the industry is facing going forward.

May I invite you to join leading experts in geoscience, reservoir engineering, CCS and data science to advance our insights in mature fields, CCS and the monitoring applications of fibre. I very much look forward to seeing you in London.