Introduction

Tissa Jayasekera (tissa.jayasekera@dti.gsi.gov.uk) is Manager of LCU’s SHARP programme

Welcome to the fourth issue of the IOR eNewsletter, the first for 2003. David Hughes, in his Editorial, includes the statistics of "visits" made to it over the past year. It is encouraging to see its growing popularity, and also very interesting to get a measure of the attraction of the various articles. Articles in the previous issues are still being visited. The plan is to retain all previous issues on the website for the foreseeable future.

This issue also contains many interesting articles. It is not surprising that the section on "CO₂" has attracted many, on account of the current interest in the use of CO₂ for EOR and sequestration. The section on "Optimisation" is also well subscribed to. In the "Articles" section we have one on the Data Life Cycle Initiative, which gives an idea of what is being done to make, mainly geoscience data, more accessible. The article "DTI/PILOT Initiatives to Promote Exploration and New Fields Development" should be of interest too.

Getting onto SHARP matters, the good news is that we have obtained approval from DTI’s higher management, for a new three year programme to commence this April (2003). The new SHARP programme has the previous Offshore Geology Programme, that guided DTI’s exploration and licensing policy, incorporated into it, but with the total value unchanged. Thus we have a more versatile, multi-disciplinary programme, that will help us address the new challenges and opportunities of the maturing UKCS.

LCU’s work has been re-focused recently on trying to increase exploration effort, attracting new players better suited to develop smaller discoveries and to take on smaller projects, and setting up a system for providing easy access to data. LCU will continue to place emphasis on getting the maximum recovery from mature waterflooded oil reservoirs (the so-called "Brown Fields") and address the barriers to development with regard to Fallow and Difficult fields. SHARP will support all these initiatives. All these objectives line up with those of PILOT and as such LCU will work collaboratively with PILOT.

This issue has the 2003 call for JIP proposals (see LCU_LED) for co-funding through SHARP. These will go before the ACHARR committee this April/May. The ACHARR committee, which met on 6 December 2002, came up with target areas to address. These are outlined in the "flyer" which provides guidelines for submission of proposals.

Lastly, here is a date for your calendars - the DTI IOR Research Dissemination Seminar this year is planned for Tuesday 24 June. It will be held in the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre and will follow a similar format to last year. We will provide more details on this in the next issue of the eNewsletter which will be in May 2003.