Peak Oil? What Peak Oil? -- Records Could Be Set This Year -- Rigzone, Rystad -- May 9, 2019

Records for oil discoveries could be set this year .... despite prices, shale, economy ... 

Re-posting:

Remember all that hand-wringing over not enough CAPEX on exploration? Rigzone suggests that the majors are driving a rise in global discoveries:

Oil and gas exploration is off to an explosive start in 2019, with such majors as BP, Eni and Exxon Mobil taking a bigger bite of the conventional resources discovered in the first quarter, according to a new report by Norwegian research firm Rystad Energy.

At the end of the first quarter global discoveries of conventional resources reached 3.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe). Most of the gains were recorded in February, announcing some 2.2 billion barrels of newly discovered resources – the best monthly total on record since August 2015.

The six largest discoveries by the oil majors each exceeded 150 million boe, and the top three could even hold more than 300 million boe apiece.

American major ExxonMobil was the most successful, with three significant offshore discoveries accounting for over 38 percent of total discovered volumes in the first quarter of 2019. With discoveries made offshore of Cyprus with 700 million barrels of oil equivalent in the Eastern Mediterranean and off of Guyana in South America with more than 5 billion oil-equivalent barrels.

Apart from Exxon Mobil, the other top discoveries were made by Paris-based oil major Total, with its Brulpadda find estimated to have a potential 1 billion barrels of "wet" gas off the coast of South Africa.

Spanish-based Repsol's South Sumatran seas find has preliminary estimates of at least 2 trillian cubic feet of recoverable resources, making it the largest such find in Indonesia for 18 years.

And in Britain’s North Sea China’s CNOOC, in a partnership with Total, made an offshore find equivalent to 250 million barrels of oil.

“If the rest of 2019 continues at a similar pace, this year will be on track to exceed last year’s discovered resources by 30 percent,” says Taiyab Zain Shariff, Upstream Analyst at Rystad Energy.