But it’s the geologists and geophysicists who take the risk capital, choose where to explore and, with science and a bit of luck, create the big value. The problem over much of the last decade was finding resource that made money. Such plays rarely match the scale of the big new basins, though they can add a few billion barrels of oil equivalent. The Appomattox (2009), Vicksburg (2013) and Ballymore (Chevron/Total in 2017) discoveries, plus five smaller finds, together hold close to 2 billion barrels of oil equivalent (mostly oil) in an exceptional Jurassic reservoir. At 250 million barrels of oil equivalent, it’s the UK’s biggest find since Culzean, and 25 times the size of the average UK find in recent years.

Source: Forbes February 08, 2019 05:03 UTC