Is there a future for Exploration? ACS suggests ‘Not Likely’
11 replies (most recent on top)
There's literally no point for an early-mid career person to be specializing in exploration right now. You can tell management knows this by how they are highlighting geos moving into different roles.
Make no mistake - this will be the exception (not the rule) moving forward because the pay should be different (less) for these alternate roles and we can't rehome everyone. In any case it's only HiPos/sponsored folks that will get moved around anyway. Everyone else is just waiting around to get slaughtered lol. This will happen in a frog-boiling sense as technical geo pip'ing stays high for the foreseeable future.
The culture manager in India may as well shoot a dart on a map and call it exploration.
That’s the future: outsource subsurface to low cost centers and put lipstick on that pig.
I bet the GCOS of such prospects will be as laughable as what STCs and Chiefs signed on for the pre-salt.
It’s not about winning - it’s the appearance of winning: Geoscience theater.
@1rmn+1eYu5Jda This has always been the Exxon strategy. It’s why we bought Mobil. It’s only when EM management decided we could try our hand at exploration in the past 15 years that our upstream became bloated and useless. We should have always stuck to what we were good at: buying companies and operating assets.
Perhaps a better approach to exploration is to eliminate it, pay down debt and build cash, then gobble up another company during the next downturn in 5 years. Preferably a company that has competent geoscientists that are listened to.
The Exploration experience base was run off/retired. Our chairman is downstream heritage. Linda also has no exploration background. If we don’t invest in something new in this “up” cycle, and I don’t hear much enthusiasm/ideas afoot, the die is cast. In addition, the effects of continuing “offshoring” will take some time to recognize. No one will have the moral courage to tell Dallas this is a bad idea until the wheels have fallen off, and by then it will be far too late. “Value chains” indeed.
Remember, it’s all about the rocks and the fiscals. And how optimistic analyses look on paper before anything gets drilled. That’s what controls my bonus. That’s what matters most.
@aig+1eYu5Jda
You have to specify what do you mean by “geoscience”.
Is it the actual workers who pointed out what is worth getting in Brazil or the top leadership of the former EMEC, who blatantly disregarded the recommandations and decided to get whatever looked best to them?
This is the EM MO: the technical people run a detailed analysis but their conclusions are disregarded by the top management who believe that what they like must be best, and then a bunch of chiefs and STCs cover up the fiasco by pretending that the bosses’ choices were the real result of the studies that took place.
And then everybody in the company blames “geoscience”. Unsurprisingly, there are very few geoscientist worthy of that name that are still willing to work for EM.
No need to ‘discover’ anything in the Permian.
After the shameful failure in Brazil, the ridiculous amount of money wasted, and the pomposity with which the eVP talked up the potential, I don’t see a way for geoscience to regain credibility.
Has he stopped wearing his Brazil flag pin??
Correction-lack of leases and Wildcats since 2020 except committment wildcats in Brazil and already ided and planned Guyana.
I sure hope so because it is the engine that drives the upstream. Will admit some new blood would help but totally doing away with Exploration means there is no future in Upstream or we spend more money buying discovered undeveloped. Hopefully the MC sees this but I am not convinced that they do. The layoffs Dec 2020 and lack of new leases and Wildcats since 2010 suggest Exploration is not a priority.
Who or what is ACS?