The Oil Drum

Jean, it is not every day that we get someone with experience of the global oil and gas exploration and production industry and a leading figure in the ASPO movement posting on these pages. Your presence here is most welcome.

The Arctic map and your charts and prose pulls the Arctic prospectivity into a realistic focus. There are two major hydrocarbon provinces already discovered and exploited - the oil prone N Slope of Alaska (green oil fields) and the gas prone South Kara, Yamal province in E Siberia (red gas fields).

There are a few dispersed large discoveries in the E Barents Sea - Shtockman is likely the best known of these and in the W Barents Sea, despite the best endeavors of the enterprising Norwegians, the discovery record is poor - owing to Tertiary inversion of the basins, gas cap expansion of the existing reservoirs leading to loss of oil and breach of top seals.

The point you make about 400m sediment on the Lomonosov Ridge is well made - for our non-geological readers we need well in excess of 3000m of sediments to have source rocks (if they exist) buried to sufficient depth to achieve the temperature required to produce oil or gas. So this is propaganda for consumption by the financial press.

Your story of Badami - which I hadn't heard before - is also quite amusing. 3000 bpd - barely enough to keep the workers camp warm. But projects like this scar the psyche of companies like BP - already scarred by Mukluk where I recall Sohio (a BP subsidiary then) built an island from where to drill the well. These scars mould the behavior of the Majors - but not their rhetoric.

A comment on gas prospectivity - is that not dominated by the Yamal reserves and would it be wrong to extrapolate that to the whole arctic ocean basin? It’s rather like concluding the N Sea would be gas prone on the basis of the Groningen Field discovery.

And some questions about prospectivity and drilling logistics in the North Kara, Laptev, and E Siberian Seas. Do you know if any drilling has taken place there, are there source rocks and are the basins truly prospecitve? The area is under sea ice for much of the year - and will likely continue to be so for the foreseeable future. So, even if discoveries are made, will they be exploitable this century. Shtockman looks like it is at the limits of current endeavor.