Image: The West’s energy reckoning: Industrial & war power cannot run on promises
Related: Mark Carney Discovers The Real World
Video: aruwan sunon
What if Britain never actually ran out of North Sea oil — it simply ran out of the easy oil?
In this documentary, we explore five technologies helping engineers recover oil that was once considered too difficult, expensive, or inaccessible to produce.
From the record-breaking directional wells at Wytch Farm, to 4D seismic revealing bypassed oil at Forties, gas injection keeping Magnus producing, polymer flooding at the Captain field, and low-salinity water injection at Clair Ridge, Britain’s mature North Sea infrastructure is being given a second look.
These technologies aren’t about discovering an entirely new oil province. They’re about extracting more from reservoirs, wells, platforms and pipelines that Britain already spent decades building.
We’ll examine how horizontal drilling can reach reservoirs miles away from the surface, how time-lapse seismic can reveal oil that water has bypassed, how gas and polymers can improve recovery, and how changing the chemistry of injected water can release additional oil from sandstone.
The North Sea is a mature basin, and UK oil production continues to decline. But the story of these fields raises a fascinating question:
How much oil was never truly recovered in the first place?
Australia’s New Invention Could Make Oil Obsolete
Video: Aussie 2050
A beam developed for fusion research could change how we reach the hottest rock beneath Earth—and reshape the future of energy.
I explore how millimetre wave drilling melts granite into smooth glass, why conventional drilling fails at extreme temperatures, and how Kays Energy and Neighbors Industries are testing the technology beyond the laboratory.
I also compare this approach with Fervo Energy’s geothermal projects and examine what deep geothermal power could mean for Australia, including its potential, technical limits, water requirements, seismic risks, and slower path toward reducing dependence on fossil fuels
