Better oil exploration

UK-developed monitoring techniques could save the oil and gas industry hundreds of millions of pounds a year in its continued search for untapped resources.

Working with £1m worth of funding from a consortium of the world’s leading oil companies, a Liverpool University team hopes to improve methods used to find oil and gas reservoirs within deeply buried submarine channels known as slope channel reservoirs.

Dr David Hodgson, a chief researcher at Liverpool’s department of Earth and Ocean sciences, said the oil giants are eyeing these channels increasingly enthusiastically. He explained that much of the oil exploration off the coast of West Africa, Nigeria and Brazil is being carried out in slope channels and that for companies such as Exxon and Total, they represent their biggest fields.

However, while some of these channels are filled with sand, others contain mud and silt, and oil is usually found beneath the former because it has a degree of porosity and permeability, he said.