The ongoing global energy crisis has highlighted the importance of continuing to invest in oil and gas exploration in order to satisfy short- and medium-term demand as the world transitions to a greener energy future.
Successful exploration is a sum of good quality scientific teamwork, creativity, strategy, the decision to take on significant risk – and a little bit of luck that the geology turned out as you hoped for.
But, let us be honest about the past seven years.
It is not like exploration for new resources has been highest priority, and many companies have spent more time buying each other, or buying reserves from each other to grow inorganically than replacing reserves through exploration.
In general, with limited budgets, the short-term focus has been on finding new and valuable oil and gas close to existing infrastructure, but the consequence is that the discovered volumes are relatively small.
In fact, for the past two years only the Lupa gas discovery in the Barents Sea and Dvalin North in the Norwegian Sea have the potential to fall into the Mid Size category as defined by NPD. The remaining small discoveries don’t add significant production to the soon declining production profile for AS Norge.
A few companies stand out, having drilled several exploration wells, and the following three companies have been nominated for their efforts: Wintershall Dea, Vår Energi and Equinor.
Equinor
The award committee wishes to give credit to the Equinor team for operating no less than 23 wells in the past two years, and participating in no less than 33. Equinor is clearly stepping up to the responsibility of being a major player on the NCS, with the main owner being the people of Norway.
Furthermore, we wish to acknowledge their commitment to add more reserves to the Johan Castberg development in the Barents Sea, but especially for the long string of positive exploration news coming from the Troll-Fram area.
Wintershall Dea
Some companies have achieved a lot with only a small team left as a result from some tough years and many mergers, and we wish to give credit to the Wintershall Dea exploration team.
Many careful decisions, probably a lot of hard work but also wise choices have resulted in value creating discoveries especially in their core area in the Norwegian Sea. Wintershall Dea operated the Dvalin North discovery, the largest discovery in 2021 containing a potential 147 million barrels of oil equivalent according to the field development plan handed in just before Christmas.
Vår Energi
In the heart of exploration lies the stamina to stick to the long term strategy for exploration and testing new ideas. The Barents Sea exploration team in Vår Energi convinced management to drill a new play, which was a long 25 years in the making, and the gas discovery turned out to be the biggest discovery in 2022. The Lupa well was also a play opener.
Partner with 50% ownership in the licence is AkerBP through the acquisition of Lundin, so credit goes to the old Lundin team as well for the patience to follow through.
And the winner is….
Vår Energi has therefore been selected as the winner of the Exploration Revived Award 2023. The company has explored continuously over the past years across different regions through participating in 15 wells. With technical discoveries in 11 of these, Vår Energi has the highest technical discovery rate for the last two years, currently standing at 67%.
In addition, where many operators lost interest in the Barents Sea in recent years, Vår Energi has demonstrated that continuing exploration can indeed pay off. We also want to acknowledge the recent strong signals from the company wanting to find good solutions for gas infrastructure in the Barents Sea.
The role of Norway as a reliable and responsible gas producer has never been more evident and important than now, and ideally, Norway should have even more gas reserves in order to secure energy to Europe and the UK.
