Poorly Informed Decision Making is the Main Exploration Challenge

Exploration’s fundamental goal is to deliver new economically producible hydrocarbon accumulations to the production department. The exploration process has typically been characterized by many dry holes or non-economic accumulations being found, and a small ratio of high value ventures. The value of hydrocarbon exploration is often difficult to understand, especially for management with non-exploration background, which are often exposed to many unsuccessful projects and start doubting their exploration department abilities.

As shown in Figure 1 , the likelihood of large discoveries is quite small, this means that in environments where the minimum economic field sizes (MEFS) are large, such as frontier or deepwater environments, the likelihood of an economic discovery is often in the 2–5% range. When oil price drops the MEFS is typically increased owing to the lower commodity price, hence the probability of an economic discovery is lowered further. We look at the reasons for this performance, and how CSEM information could significantly change it.