Deepwater Petroleum Exploration and Development in Africa - An Appraisal of Factors, Efforts, and Outcomes, 1998-2007

Abstract

Abstract This paper describes qualitatively the key factors driving deepwater petroleum exploration and development prospectivity worldwide, including but not limited to global petroleum supply and demand fundamentals, availability and accessibility to petroleum resources, technology innovations and infrastructure development, and geopolitics and fiscal arrangements. Quantitative indicators are estimated to analyze these factors with respect to deepwater activity and outcomes in Africa using number of fields discovered, the number of producing and on-stream fields, the estimated average size of discoveries, instantaneous production flow estimates, completion techniques and methods, and capital expenditure compontents and trends. The paper evaluates and compares the attractiveness and prospectivity of the deepwater in Africa using the above empirical indicators by country. Introduction There is a great urgency in the global energy industry to find lasting solutions to global energy demand growth, particularly transportation fuel demand growth, keeping in perspective the environmental implications of global warming. Unavoidably, it would take quite a long time for alternative energy to become a significant factor in the global energy supply mix because of volatility in petroleum prices. Consequently, the consensus among energy analysts is that fossil fuels, especially petroleum, will remain the dominant transportation fuel in the global energy supply mix for the foreseeable future. Paradoxically, the easy to find petroleum reservoirs located onshore and in the offshore shelf have been discovered and are nearly depleted worldwide. As a result the oil and gas industry has begun to focus on how to discover, develop, and produce petroleum from places that are remote and increasingly challenging, such as the offshore deepwater and ultra deepwater worldwide. Nearly every top-twenty international oil and gas company now considers deepwater operations as an essential component of its strategic business development. Thus, deepwater petroleum development and activity are expanding worldwide despite challenges related to price uncertainty and cost overruns, engineering complexity and technical risks, and geologic and geophysical issues. Further, the evolution of deepwater petroleum development as an important element of the global offshore oil and gas industry can be credited to advances in drilling, completion, production, and infrastructure development methods.