Scottish and Norwegian academics are pioneering remote-controlled drone use to help find crude oil reserves under the seabed of the North Sea.
While the use of underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) has been part and parcel of the oil industry for decades, it’s now believed by geologists from Aberdeen University and the University of Bergen that this can be better understood by observing from the air.
The drones will hover above the North Sea while scanning the rock formations below, enabling scans of remote, deep areas that the ROVs were unable to reach to better understand the geological formations below the seabed that may contain hydrocarbons.
The goal of the project is to eventually develop a searchable database of rock formations which will enable oil companies to build better models of the subsurface and improve recovery from oilfields.
“When you drill a well in the North Sea, you can directly measure the rocks in the borehole. However you have much less certainty about what is going on away from the well. Given that two wells are often several miles apart, predicting what the rock layers in between boreholes look like is a huge challenge.
“To solve this problem we look at similar rock units which occur in cliffs above sea level and we use the drone to make extremely detailed 3D models, which we can adapt for the subsurface.
“This gives us a much better idea of what conditions are like between these two bore holes and then allows us to predict how the oil will follow and how much we can recover,” said Professor John Howell, geoscientist at Aberdeen University.
The 10,000 British pound ($15,000) drone is part of a project called SAFARI that was created in the 1980s aimed at using technology to collect data.
“The original workers on the project have seen data collection come on in leaps and bounds since then but he introduction of laser scanning was one of the biggest improvements.
“We’re now able to create virtual rock formations that are accurate to within less than a few millimeters,” Howell said Tuesday.
The project has been sponsored by 24 oil companies, including some unidentified major oil companies, according to Aberdeen University.
A Drone That Can Help Find Crude Oil Is Being Used By Scottish and Norwegian Scientists In The North Sea
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