Solving The Chalk Mystery To Generate Oil Industry Billions of Additional Income

A piece of chalk in a laboratory at the University of Stavanger in Norway may be the key to unlock a great mystery. If the mystery is solved, it will generate billions in additional income for the oil industry. Associate Professor Merete Vadla Madland at the Department of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Stavanger is leading a group of geologists, petroleum engineers, rock mechanics, physicists, mathematicians and chemists who are now switching between modelling and experimental testing at the chalk laboratory.

They are about to uncover the mechanisms behind water weakening. The answer to this riddle is crucial knowledge for oil companies to be able to predict the reservoirs

…To appreciate the importance of this discovery, we need to go back in time to an event which has sparked a lot of brain wringing within the oil industry. In 1984, it was revealed that the North Sea oil field Ekofisk, situated 70 metres below sea level, had subsided by 1-2 metres. This was not the first time in history that a reservoir had compacted as a result of oil and gas extraction. But the scale of the seabed subsidence was unprecedented.

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