• High-impact exploration continues, Nick Terrell, PESGB President 2017
• Fractured Basements a global success, so what is happening in the UK?
• Iran and Iraq to lead oil supply growth in the Middle East

Plus much more inside

High-impact exploration continues

Despite exploration spend remaining low this year we are still seeing exciting high-impact wells emerging on com­pany’s 2017 drilling schedules. Many of these wells have the potential to open up new plays or rapidly augment emerging ones. Whilst infrastructure-led drilling continues to play a big role for many companies, truly transforma­tional results often lie in frontier acreage.

So where are these high-impact wells and who are drill­ing them?
Whilst geographies are diverse, settings continue to be dominated by deepwater. The unconventional onshore plays of North America have started to attract significant discretionary capital again, however focus here is on the productive cores of proven tight oil plays. Conventional deepwater value metrics have improved as cost defla­tion and drilling performance has improved. In this era the Majors dominate frontier drilling activity with a hand­ful of sufficiently capitalised Independents. Eni, Statoil, Total, BP and ExxonMobil lead the Majors, with Kosmos, Anadarko, Woodside and Tullow playing prominent roles in the Independent’s sector.

Following Eni’s giant 2015 Zohr gas discovery in Egypt the company continues to test the play through explora­tion drilling. BP and Total are also operating high-impact wells in the Eastern Mediterranean such as Mocha (BP) and Cyprus Block 11 (Total). Kosmos is moving forward in West Africa with wells in Senegal and Mauritania, chas­ing liquids potential following their recent giant gas dis­coveries there. Keeping a West Africa theme Ophir will be testing Ayame West in Cote d’Ivoire. Guyana and Surinam continue to be hot property with significant wells going down such as Snoek (ExxonMobil), Kolibri (Apache) and Araku (Tullow). Mexico, Columbia and Peru also offer high impact wells, as does Myanmar.

In North West Europe, Providence is pushing ahead with their much anticipated Druid/Drombeg well in Ireland’s Porcupine basin and Statoil plans to spud the Korpfjell well in the Norwegian East Barents. The latter comprises a whopping 850 km2 four-way dip closure which repre­sents an area four times the size of Johan Sverdrup!

There are many more wells worthy of note, including a few in the North Sea I might add. This all goes to show that the industry and its investors still have an appetite for big bold wells, despite the significant reduction in explora­tion dollars. Many of the prospects that these wells will test have been formed in the minds of talented subsurface professionals that make up our membership. My mes­sage to you is “keep going”. What we do has the potential to positively transform a company or a country’s future!

Now onto PESGB matters. The GEOLiteracy Festival events in April are selling out and if you would like to attend don’t leave it too late. Our Surviving the Downturn work­shop has come to London, following on from the success that the event has had in Aberdeen over the last 6 months. April will see our second event south of the border.

Our new website will soon be with us! Please check your email address is up to date before Friday 7 April as after that we will be freezing your records ahead of migration to the new platform. Once the office team have migrated your membership data over, you will be sent an email by the office with your new temporary password that will enable you to access the new site. As always please give us feedback as we wish to continuously im­prove our offering to our membership.

You will see in the magazine and on the website that we continue to offer a wide range of conferences, cours­es and field-trips. These represent excellent value and should be of interest to everyone from students to retired members. For those members seeking employment, not only do they offer good value and relevant education but they also offer potentially beneficial networking opportuni­ties. Of particular note is John Underhill’s highly regarded, North Sea Petroleum Geology course in May. This is likely to be very popular, so again, don’t delay in registering.