2013 PESA industry review: exploration

2014 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 431
Author(s):  
Rhodri Johns ◽  
Patrick Despland

Exploration activity in Australia in 2013 occurred across a broad spectrum of conventional and unconventional plays. Competition for acreage was buoyant with large tracts of key onshore basins either licensed or under application. Offshore, there were new awards on the western Australian margin and in the Bight Basin off SA. Offshore 3D seismic acquisition was reduced from anomalously high levels in 2012. Onshore 2D seismic acquisition was at historic highs and onshore 3D was the most ever recorded. Overall drilling levels were maintained despite a decline offshore. Of 13 offshore wells drilled, six were discoveries. Sixty-nine exploration wells (excluding CSG wells) were drilled onshore. Fifty addressed conventional, and 19 were unconventional shale or basin-centered gas targets. Sixty of the 69 wells were drilled in the Cooper/Eromanga Basin where conventional oil and gas exploration yielded 11 oil and six gas discoveries. Drilling and fraccing campaigns in the Nappamerri Trough unconventional gas plays provided early encouraging results. 213 exploration and appraisal CSG wells were drilled in the CSG basins of Queensland and NSW. In Queensland a record total of 1,317 CSG wells were drilled in fiscal year 2012/2013. Shale gas exploration activity was increasingly focused on the Palaeozoic and Proterozoic Basins of Western, Central and Northern Australia with major oil and gas companies involved in joint ventures preparing for drilling in 2014. The results of these programmes will have an important bearing on the future direction of exploration in these plays.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavel Mostovoy ◽  
Ildar Safarov ◽  
Evgeniy Tumanov ◽  
Maria Zaytseva ◽  
Maksim Aksenov ◽  
...  

Abstract Oil and gas companies’ future production profile is shaped by their exploration strategy and resource base development. Gazprom Neft's production profile will include 40% of current exploration projects by 2030. Geological exploration, on the other hand, is a high-risk business because it involves a lot of uncertainty due to the geological complexity of the targets being explored, as well as a lot of risky capital. Taking these factors into account, the Company will need to expand its exploration function as well as its approaches to managing exploration projects in order to meet its lofty aims. To determine the key areas of growth and a strategy for the exploration function development in the coming years, it was decided to first analyze the geological exploration activity in the Company in 2010 – 2020 period. The knowledge of achievements, success stories, and development areas is the fulcrum for future victories. Therefore, retrospective analysis is an important tool for the development of any system of activity - individual, organization, or state.



2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 493
Author(s):  
D. Lockhart ◽  
D. Spring

Available data for 2018 indicates that exploration activity is on the rise in Australia, compared to 2017, and this represents a second year of growth in exploration activity in Australia. There has been an increase in area under licence by 92 000 km2, reversing the downward trend in area under licence that commenced in 2014. Since 2016, exploratory drilling within Australia has seen a continued upward trend in both the number of wells drilled and the percentage of total worldwide. Onshore, 77 conventional exploration and appraisal wells were spudded during the year. Offshore, exploration and appraisal drilling matched that seen in 2017, with five new wells spudded: two in the Roebuck Basin, two in the Gippsland Basin and one in the North Carnarvon Basin. Almost 1500 km of 2D seismic and over 10 000 km2 of 3D seismic were acquired within Australia during 2018, accounting for 2.4% and 3.9% of global acquisition, respectively. This represents an increase in the amount of both 2D and 3D seismic acquired in Australia compared with 2017. Once the 2017 Offshore Petroleum Acreage Release was finalised, seven new offshore exploration permits were awarded as a result. A total of 12 bids were received for round one of the 2018 Offshore Petroleum Exploration Release, demonstrating an increase in momentum for offshore exploration in Australia. The permits are in Commonwealth waters off Western Australia, Victoria and the Ashmore and Cartier islands. In June 2018, the Queensland Government announced the release of 11 areas for petroleum exploration acreage in onshore Queensland, with tenders closing in February/March 2019; a further 11 areas will be released in early 2019. The acreage is a mix of coal seam gas and conventional oil and gas. Victoria released five areas in the offshore Otway Basin within State waters. In the Northern Territory, the moratorium on fracking was lifted in April, clearing the way for exploration to recommence in the 2019 dry season. With the increase in exploration has come an increase in success, with total reserves discovered within Australia during 2018 at just under 400 million barrels of oil equivalent, representing a significant increase from 2017. In 2018, onshore drilling resulted in 18 new discoveries, while offshore, two new discoveries were made. The most notable exploration success of 2018 was Dorado-1 drilled in March by Quadrant and Carnarvon Petroleum in the underexplored Bedout Sub-basin. Dorado is the largest oil discovery in Australia of 100 million barrels, or over, since 1996 and has the potential to reinvigorate exploration in the region.



Subject African oil and gas exploration. Significance Stakeholders in the African oil industry met in Cape Town in early November, for the annual Africa Oil Week conference, amid speculation of new prospects in South Africa and Namibia. While several countries in West and Central Africa are offering acreage in licensing rounds, oil and gas companies are focused on upcoming wells in Southern Africa, which will dictate decisions on companies’ future exploration focus. Impacts Exploration success for Southern Africa’s most watched wells could bring an investment boost to new areas, such as South Africa. Angola and Nigeria will try pushing reforms and new licensing to revive a largely moribund exploration sector to renew reserves and growth. IOCs will need more reassurance before committing to new Nigerian investment after Buhari's failure in 2018 to sign a key industry bill.



2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 571
Author(s):  
Stuart Trundle ◽  
Anne Probert

As pressure mounts for oil and gas companies to demonstrate tangible value to the communities in which they operate, there is a growing imperative for groups to actively engage with the industry and its operators. Regions who partner with the industry to identify and implement initiatives that leverage the investment can see very real economic and social gains from hosting oil and gas exploration and production. Venture Taranaki, the regional development agency for New Zealand’s only commercially producing oil and gas region, has been part of such a successful partnership in that area. They have worked extensively in the space between the industry and the community to maximise the benefits to the region. In doing so they have helped position Taranaki as a force in New Zealand’s economy, and it has developed initiatives that demystify and demonstrate the industry’s value to their community stakeholders, extending this momentum across the oil and gas supply chain. Its commercially neutral services have also advanced collaboration among the companies, fostered collective promotion of their capabilities, and assisted with management of demand-supply challenges in relation to project and shutdown planning. In this extended abstract the authors give an insight into their experiences, lessons for other regions, and proposals to further advance the industry-community relationship.



Author(s):  
Yanfei Wang ◽  
Shousheng Luo ◽  
Lihua Wang ◽  
Jianqiang Wang ◽  
Chan Jin

AbstractSynchrotron radiation (SR) X-ray tomography is a main technique in realizing imaging of an object section by section. We apply this technique in recovering shale microstructures which becomes a hot topic recently in non-conventional oil and gas exploration. We first set the experimental setup using SR sources at BL13W1 beamline at Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility to obtain the measured data of the shale sample, and then we establish the



Author(s):  
Shirley J. Sorokin ◽  
Merrick G. Ekins ◽  
Qi Yang ◽  
Paco Cárdenas

A new species of Tethya Lamarck, 1815 is described from a depth of 1000 m on the continental slope of the Great Australian Bight (GAB), southern Australia. The GAB slope was explored as part of systematic benthic surveys to understand unexplored communities in the light of current oil and gas exploration activity in the area. Tethya irisae sp. nov. was present at 1000 m in six of eight longitudinal depth surveys. Three molecular markers were obtained: COI, 28S (D3–D5) and ITS1-5.8S-ITS2. COI and 28S phylogenetic analyses show that the new species fits clearly within the genus Tethya. This is the 28th species of Tethya reported from Australia; it is unusual in that it has a stalk. The presence of a stalk as a morphological character to split genera in this family is questioned. The description of this new species is an opportunity to revisit the molecular phylogeny of the Tethyida Morrow & Cárdenas, 2015 using comprehensive datasets of COI and 28S markers. As in previous analyses, four Tethya clades were retrieved; we discuss the possibility of using external colour to support some of these clades. Despite unclear phylogenetic relationships amongst Tethyidae Gray, 1848 from Australia, our results suggest that tethyid genera Tethytimea Laubenfels, 1936, Tectitethya Sarà, 1994, Laxotethya Sarà & Sarà, 2002, Stellitethya Sarà, 1994, and Xenospongia Gray, 1858 derive from species of Tethya. We show that asters have been secondarily lost at least twice in the Hemiasterellidae Lendenfeld, 1889: in Liosina Thiele, 1899 and a potential new genus from northern Australia. We formally propose the reallocation of Liosina from Dictyonellidae van Soest, Diaz & Pomponi, 1990 to Hemiasterellidae Lendenfeld, 1889.





2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aroloye O. Numbere

Mangroves of the Niger Delta are the largest in Africa and are the source of numerous ecosystem services such as firewood, seafood, building materials and medicinal herbs. Their sustainable use and protection are important for future generations. However, anthropogenic activities such as oil and gas exploration, urbanization, industrialization, dredging, overexploitation and sand mining are the major disturbances that have pushed the mangroves to the brink of extinction. Therefore, in other to restore lost areas of the mangroves natural and artificial means can be adopted to bring them to a restored state. More often than not emphasis of recovery had been placed on artificial remediation and restoration, where polluted sites are cleaned with chemicals and nursery seedlings transplanted to remediated such sites. Nevertheless, this chapter discusses the possibility of utilizing natural means of forest recovery through seedling recruitment and regeneration. This can be achieved by establishing the right environmental conditions such as setting up of a hydro-channel to ensure smooth inflow and out flow of river water carrying seeds, availability of parent mangrove trees to supply the seeds, and the availability of the right soil condition to enable seedling germination and growth. The use of dried and ground mangrove parts as a new way for restoring polluted soil is discussed; in addition, the unconventional proposition of using low key pollution to manage and increase forest resilience is highlighted in this work even though further studies are recommended. Future direction of mangrove restoration should be tilted towards the application of the force of nature, which has the potentials of reversing the adverse effect of anthropogenic activities in well managed and protected sites.



1988 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 332
Author(s):  
Ronald Bogan

Over the past four years the Australian Oil and Gas Exploration Industry has moved from a period of high exploration and development, skill shortages and overseas recruitment, through to a period of declining levels of exploration activity and expenditure, low world prices and significant retrenchments.A number of manpower and training aspects of industry development and decline over the period 1980 through to 1987 are discussed.The paper reviews and examines aspects of the Australian oil and gas work force and labour market. It brings into sharp focus a number of critical training and professional development issues facing the industry today. It proposes a review and rationalisation of academic programs for geoscientists and planning for future manpower requirements for the industry.



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