The year 2020 was a strange one to say the least. At 1st Subsurface the start of the year was incredibly busy and despite the massive disruptions caused by COVID-19, we managed to adjust to working from home with relative ease and have made great progress throughout the year.
In early February we attended NAPE in Houston. Followed in early March with APPEX back in London. At both of these conferences we demonstrated our global coverage of TROVE KnowledgeBases, we also demonstrated our new toolkit - TROVE Hub Analysis.
TROVE Hub Analysis, launched in December 2019 at PROSPEX, enables strategic planning for every field, field reactivation, discovery & prospect across NW Europe. Throughout this year we demonstrated how Hub Analysis can assess future hub locations, examine current hub performance, analyse untapped potential & much more!
In March/April we were forced to reassess our goals for the year but we saw the opportunity this disruption provided. We reprioritised and were able to bring projects forward, one of those being TROVE Renewables.
In May we took the decision to create a sister company - TROVE Renewables Limited. This allowed for a sharper focus on the energy transition. We have transferred the Energy Transition KnowledgeBases for Wind, Wave, Tidal, Solar, Geothermal, Energy Storage, Hydrogen & CCUS to TROVE Renewables. This move also allows us to continue to focus all our efforts on oil and gas. For more information on TROVE Renewables, visit www.troverenewables.com.
“Starting a company in the midst of this pandemic is a little novel – looking to expand and grow when many are looking to contract or simply survive. In addition to the predicted challenges of starting a business in an economic downturn, there are some additional obstacles – for example many banks are not offering business account services to new businesses during the lockdown. However, we are confident there is a strong demand from many companies for information on renewables. Even during the pre-launch, the level of interest from potential clients has been fantastic.” - Mike Cooper (Managing Director)
In response to the University of Aberdeen's call for industry driven projects we were able to offer 4 projects for students on the Integrated Petroleum Geoscience (IPG) course. The projects covered Cretaceous prospectivity in the Northern North Sea, Triassic Prospectivity in the Southern North Sea, a wells study in the Outer Moray Firth & a study on Underground Coal Gasification. We were impressed with all of the students and the work they produced.
On the back of offering projects during the COVID-19 disruptions, we have gone on to provide work experience for several graduates amidst the downturn in the job market. We are training these interns in the use of TROVE and Excel along with general training on different petroleum provinces globally covered in our TROVE KnowledgeBases.
As well as adding Hub Analysis to our arsenal, we have also developed our Wells-to-Watch product in 2020. Wells-to-Watch is a compiled listing of upcoming wells from around the world. With over 200 projects and information on operator, partners, status and contact details, this is a fantastic add to our TROVE suite. The value of an up-to-date information source such as Wells-to-Watch has been emphasised this year with project timings shifting in response to the disruptions caused by COVID-19.
In September we presented at DEVEX Conference - "So many discoveries, too few developments. UK Blocks 30/1, 2 & 3". This talk covered the northern part of UK Quad 30, highlighting an area that has 2 producing fields, 2 discoveries currently being developed and 9 discoveries which have not yet been sanctioned. You can download a .pdf document of the talk by following this link.
In November we gave two presentations at AAPG's Let's Connect series. The first being "The Past, Present & Future Oil & Gas Fields of the North Sea and Atlantic Margin". We interrogated our TROVE KnowledgeBases in NW Europe to create a whistle stop tour of over 1,800 fields and discoveries across 6 countries. We demonstrated characteristics and geographical distribution by reservoir age, discovery location and reservoir age per decade, and analysis of success through both time and reservoir age. You can register to watch a recording of this presentation by clicking here.
The second of our Let's Connect talks covered a very different area - the South Atlantic. Once again we didn't make it easy for ourselves, opting to cover the entire South Atlantic from Guyana and Morocco in the North to South Africa and the Falkland Islands in the South. We again used the power of our TROVE KnowledgeBases to allow us to pull this talk together at short notice (we offered to fill the slot for a late cancelation so had less than a week to pull it all together!). We chose to look at this area because of the exciting discoveries made in recent years - such as the Liza field offshore Guyana. You can watch a recording of "Recent Major Developments in Oil and Gas in the South Atlantic. From Guyana to South Africa and from Morocco to the Falkland Islands - the huge potential for future growth" here.
Looking forward to next year, subscribers will see the 'usual updates' (press releases, company reports, government releases), O+G conference presentations. We will also be adding Life-of-field production oil, gas & water profiles to end 2020 for all UK, Norway & Danish fields. We have already got some conferences lined up for the beginning of 2021 - keep an eye out for announcements in the new year. On top of this, we aim to complete offshore TROVE coverage for the entire globe by the end of 2021!