First Break - Volume 15, Issue 11, 1997

The honeymoon may be over, but Steve Ludlow, the British-born president and chief operating officer of Veritas DGC, is as enthusiastic as ever about the merger in August 1996 of Digicon and Veritas Energy Services. Andrew McBarnet talked to him about the emerging new company and his long association with Digicon.

In the context of world E&P operations, meeting the needs of the US energy market is a key component. First Break reports on the US domestic oil and gas statistics on reserves and exploration results prepared by the Energy Information Administration.

What is the 'appropriate' share of profits from the UK's oil and gas operations referred to by the new Labour government? Ministers say they want to maintain a high level of oil industry interest in the development of future reserves. First Break reports on an assessment by analyst company Wood Mackenzie of the present UK fiscal regime.

Free air gravity maps can be generated using satellite radar altimetry for all offshore areas between 828 S and 828 N. Such maps are especially useful for regional structural mapping as all structural features yielding density contrasts will contribute to the gravity field at both regional and local scales. However, the gravity maps will often be dominated by major regional features which can overshadow relatively minor local features, e.g. small basins, basement highs and fault zones. Nevertheless, these minor features are describable provided that the shorter wave length gravity anomalies can be enhanced. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that satellite gravity data, carefully processed by image enhancement techniques, may be used as a suitable basis for fast regional structural mapping. The Barents Sea, which contains a number of structural features of different ages, styles and trends provides an example. The well-known south-western part was used to investigate the limitation of the method, while the data in the poorly investigated eastern areas were used to search for previously unrecognized structures. The first part of the paper focuses on data quality and image enhancement techniques. In the second part, the processed gravity image is evaluated by comparing it with a structural map of the Barents Sea (Johansen et al. 1993). Finally, a previously unknown, large, SE±NW trend observed in the eastern Barents Sea is further investigated with the aid of regional gravity modelling.