As we reported on in July this year, the NPD started to release valuable subsurface information consolidated in relinquishment reports. Relinquishment reports often contain not only a lot of valuable subsurface information with regards to prospect mapping and volumes, but also in terms of hydrocarbon migration and more regional geological assessments.
Due to confidentiality issues related to relinquishment reports issued prior to 1st January 2021, only those reports submitted this year were initially made available – of which there were 40. However, at the time it was said that following the APA 2021 application deadline on the 8th September, older reports would also be made available through Factpages.
We took a look at the 100 licences most recently relinquished on the Norwegian Continental Shelf and found that 77 of those do now have a relinquishment report attached.
Where to find the relinquishment reports?
The Factpages portal of the NPD website lists the Inactive licences across the NCS. The relinquishment reports can be found when selecting one of the inactive licences and subsequent scrolling to the bottom of the page. Using an export to Excel of all licences and a subsequent filtering and sorting (on date) of the inactive ones, it is possible to gain quick insight into those licences released this year and earlier.
It would be even better if FactMaps would also include a layer that includes the licences for which a report is available. This would make a geographical search a lot easier if one would be looking at a certain area of interest.
Out of the 71 licences relinquished so far this year, 15 are still missing a report. When sorting on “Date valid to” most of those cluster around the most recent relinquishments however, which means that there is probably some lag time between the relinquishment of the licence and the availability of the report.
It also means that the NPD has started the release of reports on licences relinquished prior to the 1st of January 2021, which is a good sign. We don’t have an overview of the total number of reports made available to date, but at least out of 29 licences that expired or were relinquished in 2020, 21 do have a report already.
This means that 77% of the licences most recently relinquished have got a report and in many cases also a shapefile of prospect outlines. It can therefore only be concluded that good progress has been made since July this year, adding a huge amount of subsurface data into the public domain.
HENK KOMBRINK
