Experienced oil-man John Brooks thinks that there is still a great deal of hydrocarbon potential in the deep reservoirs of the southern North Sea. To test this deep potential, we need political initiatives and the harnessing of technological innovations, coupled with a willingness by big oil, gas and energy companies to take a risk.

Salt and evaporites in general are often regarded as both an excellent seal for hydrocarbons and an operational challenge to drill through – but salt biostratigraphy can also provide a valuable source of information for geoscientists in oil and gas exploration.

Egypt became a net importer of LNG in 2015. However, the country announced its intention to cease imports and begin exporting LNG through its main LNG terminal at Damietta in 2020.

CGG and Fairfield Geotechnologies will acquire a series of large-scale, high-density, multi-client seismic surveys in one of the most prolific hydrocarbon regions in North America - the Central Basin Platform (CBP) of the Permian Basin in West Texas.

Leviathan, the giant Israeli gas field discovered by Noble Energy in 2010, delivered its first gas to the Israeli domestic market in December 2019, with the first exports, to Egypt and Jordan, following in January 2020.

In October 2019 the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (East Timor) launched the county’s second licensing round, releasing a total of 18 new blocks for public tender, covering a large percentage of the total on and offshore area of the country.

A number of drilling campaigns continue to expand on the oil and gas plays on the North West Shelf of Australia.

Italian giant Eni recently reported a significant gas condensate discovery, Mahani-1, in Sharjah.

In January 2020, Apache Corporation announced several oil and gas shows in the Maka Central-1 well, offshore Suriname, in the Campanian sands and the Upper Cretaceous Santonian clastics.

Denmark has a rich exploration history with numerous hydrocarbon discoveries totalling over 100 MMboe in recoverable reserves. Recently reprocessed vintage 3D data provides the perfect platform to support any renewed exploration efforts in Denmark.

An innovative new modelling workflow for reservoir characterisation has been developed that is capable of producing an advanced 3D geomodel of any subsurface zone of interest and can identify potential sand gas or oil zones that have previously lain undetected within a producing area.

Easy access to accurate maps is an important part of exploration. Francis Cram, founder and CTO of MapStand, a new open platform for easy tracking of oil and gas activities and live geo-tagged news, explains how open data access will transform the oil and gas industry.

The upstream industry has been reluctant to invest in exploration recently, especially in wildcat wells, yet from 2013-2019, north-west Europe has seen some success through wildcat exploration.

Senegal has been propelled to the forefront of industry news in recent years after several major oil and gas discoveries in its offshore waters.

Reports that Orca is the largest gas find this year have a competing claim from Iran, where in mid-October the National Iranian Oil Company announced that it had discovered a giant natural gas field.