The Asia Pacific region is starting to show “green shoots of recovery” after a tough couple of years in terms of oil and gas exploration, it has been claimed.
It comes as data suggests that 2016 was the low point for discoveries in the far east.
Globally commercial oil and gas volumes discovered fell to a nine-year low in 2016.
This was put down to a ‘lower for longer’ oil price scenario.
The data was taken from the Westwood Global Energy Group’s 2017 State of Exploration (SoE) Report which covers the last five years of global exploration (2012-2016).
The report benchmarks the performance of 40 international E&P companies (the ‘W40’) covering 991 conventional completed wildcat wells which had W40 participation.
This has caused companies to reduce exploration programmes further, with less exposure to frontier, especially deep water, and emerging play drilling.
Gas continued to be the focus for the W40 in Asia-Pacific between 2012-2016, with ~15.8 tcf of gas and ~293 mmbo discovered from 281 exploration wells drilled in the region.
And of the 991 wells with W40 participation during 2012-2016, 541 were classed as high impact wells. 84 of these were drilled in the Asia-Pacific region, discovering ~9.6 tcf of gas and 103 mmbbl of liquids.
Other findings includes that between 2012-2016, PNG topped the region for discovered commercial resources with ~4.6 tcf of gas and ~120 mmbbl from 17 wells, while Australia was 2nd with explorers discovering ~4 tcf and ~80 mmbbl.
Nine commercial discoveries were recorded globally in 2016 ≥100 mmboe, compared to 18 in 2015 and 34 in 2014.
Three of the discoveries were oil only, with the remaining six split into two oil and gas, two gas-condensate and two gas. For the Asia-Pacific region these included the Thalin-1A well drilled in the Rakhine Basin.
Across Asia-Pacific, drilling is down approximately ~50 per cent for the first half of 2017 compared to 2016, with only Australasia almost on par with last year. Exploration drilling in Southeast Asia is down ~73 per cent, but commercial success rates for these sub-regions are holding up on the reduced exploration drilling.