With more than 300 people attending and 68 companies registered, this morning Torgeir Stordal kicked off the two-days conference.
His main message at the start of the talk was that a shift from exploration towards project development has been observed, but given the longer terms future of the shelf, there is a need to step up exploration again soon.
However, he stressed that there is still a good number of exploration wells being drilled this year.
An interesting observation he shared with the audience was that of all the Norwegian North Sea dry holes drilled, in 47% of these cases migration is the main cause for the well being dry. This seemingly contradicts the well-studied nature of the basin, but must probably be seen in a light of smaller pools being targeted and migration routes still being poorly understood.
To that end, the NPD has recently launched an initiative to make more geochemical data publicly available, as well as going through an effort to better condition the data beforehand.
The talk from Daniel Stoddart from Earth Science Analytics further supported the importance of better looking at the data available out there already. He showed a few compelling examples from their recent work on identifying missed pay in the Northern North Sea using a Machine Learning approach.
HENK KOMBRINK
