Q&A: ExxonMobil looks beyond Guyana bonanza

ExxonMobil is not resting on its laurels after its giant Stabroek discovery offshore Guyana, where production is set to double to 1.2mn b/d by 2027. John Ardill, the company's vice-president of exploration, spoke with Argus' Stephen Cunningham on the sidelines of the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, Texas.

What's the outlook for exploration?

All of the investments that we're making in Stabroek today to fully explore and develop that — we're looking at what the next basins are. We're going to drill wells in eastern Canada later this year — that's an oil prospect, well over 1bn bl. We will drill in southern Angola in the Namibe basin, north of the Orange basin. We have blocks in both northern Namibia and southern Angola. If successful, there's a lot of potential and running room. In the east Mediterranean, we've amassed a 60,000km2 exploration acreage position across Cyprus, Egypt and Greece. We've already made gas discoveries there. We're getting ready to go to a very focused drilling programme next year, to see if we can discover large gas resources. We know Leviathan, Tamar, that level of potential can exist.

Will there ever be another find on the scale of Guyana?

When I started with Exxon — almost 30 years ago — we were working the Lower Congo basin in Angola, a big new deepwater play — Block 15/17. Someone said, "Do you ever think we'll be doing this again at this scale?" I said, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that the geology is going to work again. Guyana is bigger than Block 15 — it's more analogous to the whole of the Lower Congo basin. So I absolutely do believe that the resources exist, and that's what drives us to explore for those.

Will we see more mega projects in future?

Absolutely. We have to always think probably bigger and more aggressively than we have in the past. The world needs more energy and we need to reduce emissions. We're not going to do that through small projects. It doesn't fit for ExxonMobil's strengths and capabilities. We're looking for very large projects — a great example is Guyana. We shouldn't think we can never do that again. We're thinking that, or bigger and faster. We're trying to find those large resources, very high quality, that don't allow us just to do one FPSO [floating production, storage and offloading] project, but multiple, and that's where we can leverage the full scale and pace of ExxonMobil. In exploration, we are a flatter, more agile organisation and extremely disciplined.

What about Algeria and its shale prospects?

There's great potential beyond what [NOC] Sonatrach has done already. We're in discussions with Sonatrach around how can ExxonMobil come and potentially help. It's coming from our unconventional experience in the Permian and bringing that unconventional development, pace, scale and experience to a country like Algeria that has that type of resource that needs to be unlocked. It's a significant challenge to make unconventional work at scale outside of the [US] Lower 48. Many have tried and really not succeeded fully yet to that scale and pace.

What's the status of the Stabroek drilling campaign?

We've sustained a six-well drilling programme. About two to three rigs are running exploration-appraisal focus, the others more appraisal development, and we continually adjust and optimise that based on what we're finding. This year, we're spending time to really understand the gas and condensate resource.