Surej Kumar Subbiah

This marks the first of two Formation Evaluation features for 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic naturally has affected SPE meetings, causing many to be rescheduled or postponed indefinitely, but SPE papers continue to be a crucial source of technical knowledge. The selected papers explore simple and complex innovative approaches toward reservoir characterization to work around the absence of certain data.

Our industry is under pressure to produce cleaner energy. That is the mantra, more so than a few years ago. A recent report from the International Energy Agency suggested that all greenfield developments in the oil and gas sector should be stopped forthwith if we are to achieve the net-zero target by 2050. That essentially means that we squeeze what we can from the not-so-easy and mature reservoirs, many of which have sand-control problems.

[Editor's note: A version of this story appears in the August 2020 edition of E&P. It was originally published Aug. 3, 2020. Subscribe to the magazine here.] Exploration wells drilled in the offshore Kutch-Saurashtra rift basin seek to evaluate poorly illuminated sub-basalt Mesozoic pays below the Deccan Trap volcanics.