How Exploration Adapts In The Energy Transition

How Exploration Adapts In The Energy Transition

Share to Linkedin For over a century, exploration was at the sharp end of the rise of the oil and gas industry. The allure of discovery and huge value creation attracted not just geophysicists and geologists (like me) into the business but entrepreneurs, financiers and even the odd scoundrel. There's a sound case that the 6 million people still in direct employment in oil and gas globally owe their livelihoods to the conveyor belt of resource discovered by explorationists. Today, the energy transition casts a huge shadow over exploration's future. Spend on exploration and appraisal is already less than one-third of the 2014 peak and exploration departments have been shrinking relentlessly, some closed forever. COP26 will lead to exploration being harder to do, with more countries joining the handful that have already shut the door. Underground knowledge: geoscientists have a wealth of expertise that can be harnessed to accelerate ... [+] the energy transition Yet even a world on a 2 °C or lower pathway will rely on oil and gas, even new resource, for decades yet. New generations of geoscientists will be required to deliver the oil and gas supply, and to develop and operate some of the important