Neil Hodgson, head of geoscience at Searcher Seismic11 Feb 2025 14:12
Deepwater resurgence
“Internationally, from my experience with Searcher, we've had a tremendous few years of investment from the industry,” says Hodgson.
“If you’re in the right areas offering the right opportunities, there’s plenty of investment from the supermajors.
“Everyone has looked at ExxonMobil in Guyana and thought ‘oh, wow, we want to do that,’ so there's a resurgence among supermajors for deepwater frontier exploration.”
According to Hodgson: “If you're a big oil company trying to find big oil, the best place to find it is in frontier domains. The simplest geology and the biggest prospects are all out in deep water so that's where supermajors are sniffing around now.”
He says deepwater discoveries must be “big, simple and permeable” in order to be commercial, the latter a reference to Shell recently writing down its Namibian discoveries in the Orange basin due to reservoir flow constraints.
Some examples of these deepwater frontier basins lie offshore Uruguay, northern Argentina, Suriname and Brazil, Namibia and Guinea-Bissau.
Follow the source rock
Namibia’s Walvis and Luderitz basins have the same source rock as the prolific Orange basin and are where Hodgson expects supermajors to drill, despite a reluctance to revisit plays that proved unsuccessful previously.
“It takes a while for the penny to drop through the syrup, but we have all learned so much about the new geologies in deepwater that we are catching up.”
https://www.upstreamonline.com/exploration/-you-can-t-be-a-pessimistic-explorer-can-you-geoscience-expert-sheds-light-on-exploration-revival/2-1-1777934
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