Baker Hughes: Rig count rises for 6th straight week | Geothermal plant in El Salvador powers bitcoin mining | Lucy mission lifts off to study 8 asteroids
The US rig count rose by 10 to 543 last week, up from 282 a year ago, marking the sixth straight week of increases, Baker Hughes and analytics company Enverus said. The Permian Basin added one rig and now has a total of 267 active rigs.
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El Salvador, which made bitcoin legal tender in September, is powering hundreds of computers for bitcoin mining in a pilot project at a geothermal plant in the Berlin municipality. The plant generates electricity from the Tecapa volcano's subterranean heat.
NASA's Lucy spacecraft was successfully launched into space Saturday to begin a 12-year mission to study eight asteroids. Lucy will first test its instruments on an asteroid between Jupiter and Mars in 2025 before reaching and studying the remaining Trojan asteroids by 2033.
A magnitude 4.8 earthquake and an aftershock shook Indonesia's Bali early Saturday killing at least three people, injuring at least seven and damaging dozens of structures, officials said. The initial quake, which was centered 62 kilometers northeast of Singaraja and occurred at a depth of 10 kilometers, caused landslides on the resort island.
Maersk Drilling says it will drill an offshore exploration well in an Angolan block to a depth of more than 3,628 meters, which would be a world record. TotalEnergies has given Maersk a contract extension until February to drill the ultra-deepwater Ondjaba-1 well.
RockRose Energy has purchased more than 16 producing natural gas fields in the UK North Sea from SSE, in a $164 million deal that includes a conditional payment of $54 million, says Viaro Energy, which acquired RockRose last year. The assets, which are in the North Sea's Greater Laggan, Bacton Catchmen and Easington Catchment areas, are expected to produce more than 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day this year.
Researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Maryland spent a week in Colorado studying oil and gas drilling sites to understand the effect fracking has on the environment. The researchers collected data on methane emissions, which will be sent to local health departments to aid in determining whether more regulation around fracking is needed.
In an online lecture Wednesday, Oct. 20, Oz Yilmaz will present two topics from the new SEG book "Land Seismic Case Studies for Near-Surface Modeling and Subsurface Imaging." The first topic will be a reality check on full-wave inversion applied to land seismic data for near-surface modeling. The second will pertain to prestack depth migration image quality versus error in interval velocity field in cases of complex overburden structures. The one-hour lecture begins at 8 a.m. (CDT). Learn more.
Free webinar to examine DAS applied to traffic
A free webinar titled "Plain Trains, and Automobiles: Applying Geophysics to the Monitoring of Transport Networks Using DAS" will examine experiences in applying geophysical analysis to the monitoring of transport networks using distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) with examples from both road and rail traffic. The webinar takes place Oct. 19 at 9 a.m. (CDT). Learn more.
