Is SE Asia mature for exploration?

Mature exploration areas are those already well understood, with the majority of the commercially viable oil and gas deposits found. Further exploration in these areas only makes financial sense if the explorer has access to the existing infrastructure, or the government has awarded financial incentives.

So is SE Asia well understood? I would argue that large parts are not and therefore there are likely to be overlooked discoveries. Clearly most workers would agree that eastern Indonesia, with the high costs of logistics and operations, and complex tectonic settings, must have potential, at a price. However I argue that western areas (Sundaland) are also over-simplified and not properly understood. A quick one line argument for this was the discovery of the Banyu Urip giant oil field, surrounded by satellite gas fields in east Java from about 2000-2005. More oil and gas was found during this short period that in the entire century of exploration from the 1890’s to 2000. Reefs were found where reefs should not have been. Oil charge existed where all fields should have been gas (the expected source rock was post mature for oil generation before Banyu Urip was sealed).

The massive advances in marine seismic acquisition and processing from 1990-2000, plus logistic problems working onshore areas with populations to be fairly dealt with and compensated, focussed operators into first shallow then deep marine blocks. That is a simplification, but a fair summary that was also compounded by a loss of skills to deal with tectonically complex areas. ExxonMobil had convinced the world that eustasy was a global stratigraphic control and passive margin methods were applied to tectonically active areas with disastrous results for science. Geology “lost the plot” in the dynamic basins of SE Asia.

In 2019 I published a paper on North Sumatra where I could show this was not one, but two basins, each with distinct stratigraphy and different petroleum systems, different creaming curves and different Yet-to-find estimates. I closed with a comment “It is perhaps a little surprising that the oil industry has been satisfied for so long not knowing what is the source rock for this and adjacent giant fields, with no evidence- based stratigraphic model to project elements of petroleum systems into un-drilled areas.” This refers to the Arun supergiant gas-condensate field and nearby giant gas fields. I expected this derisory comment to be flagged as in-appropriate language by the reviewers, but it was let through. I left it there as it was truly surprising to me that, considering the financial investment involved, we really had a very shoddy understanding of the basic geology of the whole area. Geology had lost the plot; although regular papers are published on the area repeating the same un-tenable stratigraphic framework.

This stagnation as a research science is not unique to this area and is discussed in a related blog on “is there a validation crisis in geology?” Large areas of SE Asia have overlooked, mis-understood geology, and many of these areas have oil seeps.

So no, SE Asia is not mature for exploration. It is short of validated ideas and genuine innovation. Too many operators want to buy AI or seismic attribute analyses software, or better deep resistivity tools (remember them?). Meanwhile we use horribly ambiguous terms like Ngimbang Formation as pseudoscience jargon with which to convince ourselves we are still doing geology. This auto-pilot method has failed us and we are well off-course.