The oil and gas industry is seeing a resurgence in exploration success fueled by advanced seismic technology.
In a span of about 20 days:
“When you read about these discoveries … there’s a couple of things that they all have in common. They talk about seismic technology, which is great,” TGS CEO Kristian Johansen said this week at the IMAGE ’25 geoscience conference in Houston. “This is music to our ears for sure. It was fun listening to [the] BP earnings call and the top executives of BP are sitting there for almost 10 minutes … talking about seismic and seismic technologies.”
Oil and gas exploration is returning to the spotlight as energy demand rises and companies seek new resources, following years of declining investment and subsequently fewer discoveries. Seismic acquisition technology, along with full waveform inversion (FWI), ocean bottom nodes (OBN), AI with enhanced compute power and data integration are expected to play key roles in leading explorers to oil and gas.
However, the renewed exploration drive comes amid an increasingly complex environment with challenging reservoirs and aboveground uncertainties, according to panelists who led off the conference Aug. 25. Still, they see opportunity for technology-driven discoveries, including by re-examining mature basins, shallow-water plays and a willingness to pursue a variety of basins.
Perception versus reality
Despite the spate of recent exploration wins, the number of new-field wildcat wells is down to about 500 per year, said session moderator Bob Fryklund, chief upstream strategist for S&P Global Commodity Insights. He added the success ratio is around 40%. “With those fewer wells, we’re still encountering much more complicated reservoirs,” he said.
Fryklund mentioned billion-barrel fields being thrown back. Namibia’s oil-rich Orange Basin attracted several major oil players, but many have pulled out of projects due to technical and geological difficulties that make developments commercially unfeasible. The departed include Shell, Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
Just about every reservoir is more complex when it’s entered, panelists said.
Overall, fewer exploration wells are being drilled today, putting a bigger spotlight on the discoveries that are being made, said Chris Olson, vice president and head of exploration at Murphy Oil Corp. “It takes a lot of discoveries to make big discoveries happen.”
Different basins have different critical risk elements, said Danielle Carpenter, general manager of Chevron’s global exploration review team. Exploration requires access to all data to put together a story and test new ideas, she said.
Carpenter echoed the theme of industry not drilling enough wells—for various reasons—to make more discoveries.
The situation turns around with more exploration investment, she said, comparing it to “having a new pair of glasses so that you could actually see what your plays might be and then having the business model to drive that back up to then make the discoveries.”
Growing complexity
With most of the easy-to-find oil and gas gone, explorers are challenged to find new resources in more complex reservoirs, panelists agreed.
Subsurface complexity, higher pressures and temperatures along with greater depths are among the challenges.
“There’s also above ground complexity: things like increasingly protracted permitting, increasing environmental requirements,” said Tanya Herwanger, senior vice president of strategy and new markets at Shearwater GeoServices. “And even when permits are issued, you don’t know if they’re going to stand. And we’ve had some recent examples on that. So, there’s complexity upon complexity upon complexity.”
It's important to understand the objective—the problem to solve—when acquiring data to its value, she said, “not just at the acquisition stage by choosing the right tools for the problem, but also later on at the processing stage.”
The Cenozoic rift Cuu Long Basin is among the basins considered challenging and promising for exploration.
Murphy Oil announced in January an oil discovery at the Hai Su Vang-1X well offshore Vietnam in the Cuu Long Basin. The company floated 10,000 bbl/d from the middle of the mature basin with significant upside, Olson said.
“So, without talking specifically, continental systems rift basins can be inherently complex,” he said. “We’ll hope to de-risk that with the right data acquisition along the way.”
Whole core data in exploration matters, he added. Automation advances—specifically the ability to simultaneously acquire sparse and dense node—also help to “solve multiple problems at once.”
Technology, costs mismatch
Panelists also discussed what Shearwater’s Herwanger called the inherent tension between the “technology needed for complexity and the cost to achieve or deploy that technology to solve the problem.”
She cited the presalt Santos Basin offshore Brazil as an example: geologically complex, ultradeep water and a challenging aboveground environment.
“There’s been aggressive investment in OBN to solve those problems, to enhance imaging and to unlock the potential of those basins. And there’s more in the pipeline, more investment to do that,” Herwanger said. But at the same time, that “plays out under a procurement system that is required to award to the lowest bidder. So, you’ve got high complexity, high demand for high-end technology and a procurement system that doesn't really support that need. So, there’s a mismatch sometimes, [but] not everywhere.”
When asked what operators want when designing a program, Johansen said, “I have to be honest with you, what they always say is it has to be cheaper.”
When operators seek seismic data, there is increasing focus on combining OBN and streamer data to optimize imaging quality and cost as well as using elastic FWI to extract high-resolution subsurface models.
“Our clients are really good at challenging us and we’re trying to do our best being on that treadmill of research and development and making sure that we can do it cheaper, faster and better,” Johansen said.
Emerging opportunities
Finding spots for more oil or gas sometimes means going back to where you’ve been before with better technology, such as the Gulf of America.
“It’s a great example where we have been acquiring seismic for 45 years and every 10 years there’s someone saying that you guys are done. So where is your growth going to come from because you've covered the Gulf?” Johansen said.
But looking at images processed with the “latest and greatest” elastic FWI looks completely different than data acquired only three years ago, he said. “The value proposition of being able to come back multiple times and acquire the same data and show up with a result that is just better and better is just extremely stimulating.”
Many simplified assumptions are made during exploration, added Carpenter, but “when we develop it, we actually find it’s much more complex. So, the devil’s always in the details.”
Not only will the improved imaging technology help find new reservoirs, improved drilling, production and reservoir management technologies will as well, she said.
Herwanger puts her on money on the Pelotas Basin in Brazil as the next exploration hot spot, given it’s analogous to the Orange Basin. Johansen said he hopes it’s the Equatorial Margin of Brazil, given “we are investing in an incredible amount of money there right now.”
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