Founder & Managing Director - Actus Veritas Geoscience
Marel Sanchez is Founder and Managing Director of Actus Veritas Geoscience (AVGEO), an international geoscience consultancy supporting operators, investors, and partners in the evaluation of exploration, development, and energy opportunities worldwide.
With more than 30 years of industry experience, she provides hands-on technical leadership across basin and petroleum systems analysis, seismic interpretation, play and prospect evaluation, reservoir characterization, opportunity screening, and technical due diligence. Her work connects subsurface understanding with project risk, commercial objectives, and investment decisions.
Marel leads fit-for-purpose multidisciplinary teams and international collaborations, bringing together geoscientists, reservoir specialists, data professionals, and regional experts to address complex projects in frontier, emerging, deepwater, and mature petroleum provinces.
Her international experience spans Latin America, the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, West and East Africa, North Africa, and the Atlantic margins, working across different technical, cultural, regulatory, and business environments.
Actus Veritas + U3 Explore - From Consulting Expertise to Digital Knowledge
Experience through Actus Veritas highlighted a recurring industry challenge: energy companies have access to enormous volumes of technical information, but much of that knowledge remains fragmented across reports, maps, databases, historical studies, and individual subject-matter experts.
This challenge led to the collaboration behind U3 Explore, bringing together geoscience expertise, specialized partners, regional knowledge, global analogs, GIS, and data technology to build a reusable digital knowledge framework.
While Actus Veritas focuses on international consulting, technical interpretation, and project-specific advisory, U3 Explore focuses on building and connecting knowledge through U3D.
Together, they bridge:
Geoscience Expertise → Structured Knowledge → Global Analogs → Analytics → Opportunity Screening → Decision Support
Co-Founder & Technical Lead - U3 Explore
As Co-Founder and Technical Lead of U3 Explore, Marel leads the technical vision and continued development of U3D, a geoscience knowledge and intelligence platform designed to transform fragmented subsurface information into structured, connected, geospatial, and analytics-ready knowledge.
U3D connects the petroleum value chain through a consistent technical hierarchy:
Basin → Play → Field → Reservoir
The platform integrates regional geology, global field and reservoir analogs, production history, GIS, infrastructure, and technical literature, allowing users to move between regional geological understanding and asset-level analysis within a common framework.
Marel's role combines geoscience leadership with digital product development. She defines the geological framework, data relationships, technical standards, quality-control workflows, and analytical applications while coordinating geologists, geophysicists, reservoir specialists, GIS/data professionals, and international subject-matter experts.
Building AI-Ready Geoscience Knowledge
A key direction of U3D is the development of an AI-ready geoscience knowledge architecture.
The objective goes beyond digitizing documents or building databases. U3D structures information while preserving the geological relationships, provenance, spatial context, and expert interpretation needed to make the information meaningful.
This foundation is designed to enable increasingly advanced search, analytics, analog identification, knowledge retrieval, and future AI-assisted subsurface workflows, while keeping geological expertise at the center of technical interpretation.
Regional applications, including U3D Venezuela and the Caribbean–Atlantic Margin–Gulf of Mexico framework, demonstrate how historical knowledge, modern analytics, and global analogs can be integrated to evaluate both mature-field opportunities and frontier exploration potential.
Marel's work at U3 Explore ultimately connects geoscience, technology, data, and people—building reusable knowledge systems that help technical teams understand opportunities faster and make better-informed subsurface decisions.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
- Exploration & Subsurface Leadership — Basin analysis, petroleum systems, play fairway evaluation, 2D/3D seismic interpretation, prospect maturation, and regional-to-asset evaluation across frontier, deepwater, and mature petroleum provinces.
- Reservoir & Production Intelligence — Integrated field and reservoir characterization, production analytics, global analog benchmarking, mature-field evaluation, and identification of redevelopment opportunities.
- Digital Geoscience & AI-Ready Knowledge — Technical leadership in geoscience databases, GIS, structured subsurface knowledge, data integration, digitalization, and development of AI-ready geological frameworks and analytical workflows.
- Opportunity Screening & Technical Due Diligence — Country, basin, block, play, and asset screening; subsurface risk and uncertainty assessment; data-room evaluation; portfolio ranking; and technical support for investment decisions.
- International Exploration & Country Entry — 30+ years of experience across Latin America, the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic margins, West and East Africa, and North Africa, working with operators, investors, NOCs, regulators, and international partners.
- Technical Leadership & Project Management — Leadership of multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, technical programs, strategic partnerships, subject-matter experts, and complex international geoscience projects.
- Technology & Analytics — Petrel, Kingdom, ArcGIS, Power BI, geospatial analysis, data visualization, geological data integration, and digital workflows supporting exploration and asset decisions.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS
- Casey, K., Krueger, A., Sanchez, M., Norton, I., 2017, Cretaceous Deformation of the Demerara and Guinea Plateaus during South Atlantic Opening. Rifts III: Catching the wave.
- Sanchez M., 2019, Insights into the Geological Framework of Northeastern South America. First HGS/EAGE Conference on Latin America.
- Arminio, J.F., Giraldo C., Sanchez M., 2021, Geologic framework for critical risk factors analysis of a Tertiary carbonate play in Colombian-Venezuelan sedimentary basins along the Caribbean margin of South America, Third HGS/EAGE Conference on Latin America,19-20 November 2019.
- Schofield, K, Casey, K., Sanchez, M, 2022, Deploying Petroleum Play-Based Exploration Methodologies for Carbon Storage Site Characterization Poster at AAPG CCUS, Houston, TX.
- Sanchez, M, 2022, Insights into the Geological Framework of Northeastern South America: Implications to Petroleum System and Opportunity Assessments, AAPG ICE 19-22, April, Cartagena, Colombia.
- Arminio, J.F, Giraldo, C., Sanchez, M., 2022, Multi – basin look at the Oligo – Neogene carbonate play in the South Caribbean margin of South America, AAPG ICE 19-22, April, Cartagena, Colombia.
- Casey, K, Sanchez M., Norton, I., 2023, From Plate Tectonics to Basins, Plays and Risked Barrels, Offshore Somalia, 2023 EAGE View, Austria.
- Giraldo, C., Sanchez, M., 2023, Structural styles in the Jubba Deep Basin offshore Somalia, AAPG- ICE, Madrid, Spain.
- Sanchez, M., Mujica, D., Casey, K., 2023, Using Geophysical Methods to De-Risk a Frontier Deep Water Basin Offshore Somalia, AAPG- ICE, Madrid, Spain.
- Schofield, K., Sanchez, M., Cassey, K., 2023, A Model for Carbonate Fairway Deposition on the Mid-Somalia High, East Africa, AAPG- ICE, Madrid, Spain.
- Sanchez, M., Arminio, J.F., Casey, K., Schofield, K., 2024, Much more than an Oil Country, GeoExPro 2 Magazine, vol. 21. p. 20.
- Arminio, J.F., Sanchez, M., 2024, Incremental Exploration of Prolific and Mature Basins with a Data-Intensive Drive: Revisiting the Complex Maracaibo Basin, Venezuela, AAPG Canda and Latin America &Caribbean Margins, Canada 2023- Geosciences Technology Workshop: Optimizing Exploration Workflows: Bringing Expertise Between the Rockies and the Andes, May 9-10,
- Casey, K., Sanchez, M., Schofield, K., 2014,Unlock Exploration Potential Offshore Somalia, 2024 IMAGE AAPG and SEG, Houston, Texas.
- Cossey, S.P.J., Casey, K., and Sanchez, M.,Amplitude Anomaly trends in the Central Gulf of Mexico Area., 2024 IMAGE AAPG and SEG, Houston, Texas.