Technology, Persistence Key to Statoil's Offshore Canada Success

From Statoil’s point of view, the company could have chosen to do far less; instead, the company is expanding its efforts into the UK for the first time in many years.

“From an exploration point of view, we’re humble enough to realize not everything is done.”

In the case of Norway, initial exploration efforts have focused on easily identifiable resources, then infield exploration. Now, Statoil has moved into conceptual exploration, focused on resources that can’t be seen on seismic, but using intuition to see where an oil and gas trap may lie. While the company’s exploration strategy has been to focus on high impact wells, Statoil also continues to make a number of smaller, yet valuable oil discoveries offshore Norway.

“These discoveries haven’t just suddenly appeared,” Dodson noted. As plays mature, the oil and gas industry needs to think conceptually about where oil and gas could be generated.

Seismic technology advances will remain important for the industry as oil and gas companies go deeper and pursue more complex geology, such as salt covers in the Gulf of Mexico, offshore Brazil and Angola. In Norway, operators find they need more resolution on seismic to detect more subtle conceptual traps. However, seismic in itself is not enough with people and the creativity to interpret data.

“If you don’t have the concepts in mind, it doesn’t matter what data you have,” Dodson commented.