This text provides a snap-shot of current understanding on the petroleum geology of the East Irish Sea and adjacent areas.

This text provides a snap-shot of current understanding on the petroleum geology of the East Irish Sea and adjacent areas.

North Sea and onshore Netherlands and Germany, Paleozoic hydrocarbon plays across parts of NW Europe remain relatively under-explored both onshore and offshore. This volume brings together new and previously unpublished knowledge about the Paleozoic plays of NW Europe to describe significant additional exploration opportunities outside and below existing plays. The volume contains papers on Paleozoic plays in the North Sea, Irish Sea, onshore UK, France and Switzerland. They highlight how improvements in seismic data quality and the availability of previously unpublished well datasets form the basis for improved understanding of local to regional interpretations that move forward from generalized basin development models. The improved structural trap and source rock basin definition feeds to better constrained, locally variable burial, uplift, maturation and migration models. Particularly notable are the significant mapped extents and thickness of Paleozoic source, reservoir and seal rocks in areas previously dismissed as regional highs and platforms.

The history of the European oil and gas industry reflects local as well as global political events, economic constraints and the personal endeavours of individual petroleum geoscientists as much as it does the development of technologies and the underlying geology of the region. The first commercial oil wells in Europe were drilled in Poland in 1853, Romania in 1857, Germany in 1859 and Italy in 1860. The 23 papers in this volume focus on the history and heritage of the oil and gas industry in the key European oil-producing countries from the earliest onshore drilling to its development into the modern industry that we know today. The contributors chronicle the main events and some of the major players that shaped the industry in Europe. The volume also marks several important anniversaries, including 150 years of oil exploration in Poland and Romania, the centenary of the drilling of the first oil well in the UK and 50 years of oil production from onshore Spain.

This text covers a wide range of exploration topics from the regional to the field scale. It provides new information on Neogene to recent stratigraphy and sedimentation in the North Atlantic. A significant amount of exploration has taken place since the publication of Geological Society special publication no. 93 in 1995.

Geological Society Memoir 52 records the extraordinary 50+ year journey that has led to the development of some 458 oil and gas fields on the UKCS. It contains papers on almost 150 onshore and offshore fields in all of the UK’s main petroliferous basins. These papers range from look-backs on some of the first-developed gas fields in the Southern North Sea, to papers on fields that have only just been brought into production or may still remain undeveloped, and includes two candidate CO2 sequestration projects. These papers are intended to provide a consistent summary of the exploration, appraisal, development and production history of each field, leading to the current subsurface understanding which is described in greater detail. As such the Memoir will be an enduring reference source for those exploring for, developing, producing hydrocarbons and sequestering CO2 on the UKCS in the coming decades. It encapsulates the petroleum industry’s deep subsurface knowledge accrued over more than 50 years of exploration and production.

Since the 3rd edition of this publication, emphasis within the petroleum industry has shifted from exploration to appraisal and development of existing hydrocarbon resources. This change is reflected in this new 4th edition, which has been significantly expanded to accomodate additional material. The centrepiece of the book, however, remains a series of descriptions, in stratigraphic order, of the depositional history and hydrocarbon related rock units of the North Sea.