The Oil Drum

However, the question is not whether there are potentially accumulations in these off limits areas that are attractive as investment opportunities for individual companies and investors. The answer to that is yes.  But a more important question is whether there are areas of the planet that are 1) unexplored or underexplored; 2) currently off limits for exploration and development; and 3)considered to have enough prospectivity to add several million barrels per day to the global production mix.  My personal answer to that is unequivocally no (ANWR not withstanding).

All of the areas outboard of the world's major river deltas have been explored.  (The Mississippi, the Nile, the Congo, The Niger, the Amazon, the MacKenzie etc.).  The biggest deepwater fields found to date are not much more than a billion barrels recoverable each.  Some of these are forecasted to produce at 250,000 BOPD when they are fully up and running.  So it will take 4 of the biggest ever found to fill a production hole of 1 MMBOPD.  If demand is increasing by 2 million barrels per day, we have to be finding about 8 of these every year to fill this hole ( I know, I am preaching to the choir) even without regard to depletion.   Have we as a global deepwater explorers missed this much? I doubt it.