25 years of UK North Sea exploration

Abstract

Any attempt to summarize 25 years of exploration for petroleum in the UK sector of the North Sea must be a daunting task. The outcome, in terms of the oil and gas fields discovered, is the subject of this volume. This introduction will attempt to outline, very briefly, some of the ups and downs of the exploration history which has led the industry to where it stands today, 25 years on (Fig. 1).When the author was at university in the early 1950s the very idea the the United Kingdom would be likely to become a significant, let alone major world producer of petroleum would have been viewed as utterly ridiculousIt is true that oil and gas indications had been encountered in wells and mines in such disparate areas as sussex, the west Midlands and the Midland Valley of Scotland and as seepages in Dorset, Lancashire and West Lothian, but these had been thoroughly investigated without the discovery of any economically significant oil or gas fields. Indeed, the only economic production at that time came from BP's small east Midlands fields based on Eakring where the first discovery had been made in 1939The first Serious attempt to explore for oil in the United Kingdom was initiated in 1918 for strategic reasons, when 11 relatively shallow wells were drilled on anticlinal features in various parts of the country. of these only one, Hardstoft-1 in Derbyshire, discovered producible oil, but attempts to follow up the discovery were unsuccessful.Exploration then