“The success rate over the last 18 months has been remarkable for such a mature area [as the NCS],” Torgeir Stordal, director of technology and coexistence at NPD, said during the recent conference “NCS Exploration – Recent Advances in Exploration Technology“.
Stordal highlighted the following:
- High levels of exploration activity are the result from having access to good acreage as well as lots of high quality data,
- Exploration on the NCS is profitable in all areas (the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea),
- Lowered unit costs make new discoveries more resilient against potentially lower oil price in the future, and – not the least –
- The “yet to find” potential is still substantial.
Investing in technology is paramount
However, continued exploration is urgent across the entire NCS in an attempt to arrest the rapidly declining reserve base, and especially where infrastructure has a limited lifetime.
“Although the NPD sees production to remain high up to 2030, without new discoveries oil and gas production will decline quite steeply after 2030. We therefore need a willingness to develop and implement new technology in order to continue our exploration success,” he said.
The Exploration Innovation Prize: “The Winner is: A Cutting Edge Cuttings Project”.
“It is therefore more critical than ever that the industry is willing to test new ideas, plays and prospect concepts and apply new technology including advanced analytics,” he added.
The fact that finding new commercial oil and gas is becoming increasingly challenging was a key topic when NPD presented their resource report three years ago [Resource Report 2018 – Exploration]. The conclusion was that «Increased knowledge, more and better data, new technology and new ways of working open up new exploration opportunities and can result in additional commercial discoveries».
“I believe the exploration track record over the last two years confirms this statement – a number of commercial discoveries and several potentially commercial discoveries have been made,” Stordal said.
The need for the service industry
In a follow-up technology workshop, it was concluded that:
- The developments in seismic technology have contributed significantly to understanding the subsurface,
- Advances in computing power have been key for these developments.
Moreover, it was concluded that data analytics, Machine Learning and AI have the potential to play a key role in the analysis of geological data.
“Even if this workshop happened more than two years ago, I believe the conclusions remain largely valid,” Stordal said.
Collaboration between oil companies, service companies and the regulators was also encouraged three years ago. Stordal referred to TopSeis as a great example of a technology alliance between the oil industry and the service industry.
Torgeir Stordal therefore stressed that “It is critical that the oil companies recognize the importance of the service industry – a sector currently going through very difficult times”.
HALFDAN CARSTENS
