Fact box 5.2 - Machine-readable core data

The oil companies are required to retain cores from all exploration and production wells on the NCS.

Taken from virtually all exploration and a selection of production wells, this material is held in the NPD’s Geobank (figure 5.4). A large number of samples are also stored at Stratum Reservoir in Stavanger, which administers both physical materials and photographs of drill cores.

Cores have been retained and photographed ever since the 1970s. In recent years, a project scanned the negatives in order to make them available in Diskos. A total of about 30 000 core images from more than 1 100 wells (drilled before 2000) were digitalised.

Financed by Diskos, this work was completed in February 2020. Digitalisation allows the information to be integrated with company data and analysed using new tools such as image recognition and ML.

 

Figure 5.4 Oil samples in the NPD’s Geobank