A little bit of humour is a very effective way to dress up a conversation, and VP Exploration at Petronas Mohd Redhani did just that during today’s opening session at the IMAGE Conference in Houston, Texas. He said that his company Petronas recently got the mandate to drill more wells in Malaysia, and that he can now finally claim a success rate of 100% even before spud. The dream of every explorer. The reason? Even in the case of a water-wet reservoir at primary target, the company can instead celebrate the discovery of a saline aquifer for CO2 injection…
Other than that, there were no big reveals nor disagreements between the panel members, Tracey Henderson from Apache, Kevin McLachlan from TotalEnergies, John Ardill from ExxonMobil and Mohd Redhani. I have have seen most of them feature at quite a few conference sessions in recent years.
But anyway, what else was said? Or maybe not said… What I found interesting is how often John Ardill referred to Guyana as a success case and how little Kevin McLachlan referred to Namibia. Of course, the two areas are in a different phase of development, but with our recent poll in mind – whether there may be challenges related to the Orange Basin reservoir properties – there is maybe a reason why McLachlan did not mention the Venus discovery too often, despite its potential size.
Time will tell. But that is the very thing. Ardill emphasized the pace with which his company wishes to commercialize new discoveries now and in the future, and he compared the “slow” development of Angolan fields some 25 years ago when he had just joined ExxonMobil to how fast things have progressed in Guyana. And that it only needs to go faster. Well, developments in Namibia are certainly not fast in his book then. As Graeme Bagley noted in an article last week, Namibia would be producing already had it been on the same timeline as Guyana. There are no signs of first oil yet.
Maybe we will hear some more about Namibian reservoir quality the coming days.
