To the last drop

摘要

Over the past five years or so, there's been a resurgence in the fortunes of oil companies searching for black gold beneath the North Sea. The focus of the work is altered slightly from the 1970s heyday, when the aim was massive fields that were easy to exploit, and now often means a return to partly exploited reserves. And oil giant BP is still active in the area. One of its biggest upcoming projects is the redevelopment of the Schiehallion and Loyal oil fields to the west of the Shetland Islands. The ￡3 billion project will see, in 2014, 25 wells drilled in these fields, which were first exploited in 1998 and have so far produced 400 million barrels of oil. This should see 450 million more barrels being produced until 2035. The key to the discovery of these reserves is the improvement in the seismic data used in exploration. Dr Mark Burchell, BP's subsurface manager on the Greater Schiehallion redevelopment, says acquiring this data and the algorithms to process it, is something BP has been focusing on. "BP has had a huge research project on this for the last 10 years which comes off our involvement in the Gulf of Mexico where there are very complex structures in the subsurface, which complicates things enormously," he says.