Friday 10 January 2020

Rystad Energy has estimated that 12.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) in 2019, the highest volume since 2015.Last year recorded 26 discoveries of more than 100 million boe, with offshore regions dominating the list of new oil and gas deposits.

Global Conventional Discoveries

One of the major success in terms of the volume discovered Guyana's success story from 2018 continued in 2019. ExxonMobil particulary benefeting adding four new discoveries within its offshore Stabroek block. Also, Tullow Oil's Jethro and Joe exploration wells established the presence of a working petroleum system to the west of the Stabroek block.

“ExxonMobil can be declared explorer of the year for a second year in a row thanks to its ongoing efforts and results in Guyana, along with significant investments in Cyprus. The supermajor was exceptional, both in terms of discovered volumes and value creation from exploration,” says Palzor Shenga, a senior analyst on Rystad Energy’s upstream team.

This mean the company had 1.07 billion boe in additional net resources. With the value created estimated to be about $2.7 billion largely driven by Guyana. In Mauritania, BP’s Orca gas field was the largest single discovery, as well as the deepest-water find of 2019, estimated to hold about 1.3 billion boe of recoverable resources. Recent gas discoveries in the region now support plans to build an additional LNG hub in the Bir Allah area in Mauritania.

Hoever, it was not all good news. As many of 2019's high-impact wells failed to deliver. Shenga noted. “Although the discovered volumes for 2019 surpassed the preceding year, it was a disappointing year for high-profile wells as many prospects with significant estimated pre-drill resources failed to deliver. Over 10 billion barrels of estimated pre-drill volumes were at stake in wells that failed to encounter hydrocarbons.”

2019 Expolartion peformance for the most successful companies

While ExxonMobil was the biggest explorer in 2019 of the companies. Hess and CNOOOC are 2nd and 3rd respectively on the list of top explorers of 2019 in terms of value creation from new discoveries as they benefited from their partnership with ExxonMobil in Guyana’s Stabroek block. Hess created $2 billion in value and CNOOC $1.8 billion from new discoverer last year.

In 2020 it is forecasted that the global discovered volumes to continue the rising trend of recent years.