You are reading this at both the end and the beginning of extraordinary Eras. Humanity is engaged in a desperate mission to search for the carbon-based energy resources that will “fill the gap” between the depletion of existing fields and the inexorable demands for future production required whilst we transition to low-carbon energy for all. All hopes lie in the hands of the explorers who have systematically scoured the accessible world for over seventy years and who know their only chance to find new resources in quantity is to look somewhere they haven’t looked before. That new arena has been unexplorable until now. It lies on a part of the Earth that has geologies we are only just beginning to understand, indeed a part of the Earth that is so inaccessible it is almost beyond our comprehension.
The hope that keeps us here is that the oil and gas needed to fuel the transition will be found in the world’s deepwater basins on passive continental margins, such as the Pelotas Basin of Brazil, shown in the foldout line here. Fortunately, this existential search could not have come at a better time as this new responsibility for our industry has come exactly at the moment when we have developed the new technologies to achieve it.