What’s the outlook for the offshore industry?

Offshore is looking very positive in terms of the outlook as one of the big sources of extra production for the energy security issue that we have today. The challenges are resource allocation and how we work with the customers in advance to assign limited resources to the right project in the right time.

Where are the key offshore opportunities?

Seventy percent of all the global reserves discovered in the last ten years was in the offshore environment. So, this presents a big opportunity for the future and the customers are allocating more than fifty percent of their capex for offshore final investment decisions (FIDs) that’ll happen in the next five years, so it’s looking quite exciting for the offshore industry.

There will be challenges of course with resource allocation and planning, as I already mentioned, but offshore today presents a good opportunity in terms of a lower breakeven price and lower carbon intensity. That’s what the industry is looking for today.

Related: Asset Life Extension: Optimize OPEX, Minimize Carbon Footprint

Offshore activity has been picking up in prolific areas, including Guyana and Suriname. Where else is activity picking up?

The presalt of Brazil has been very active with a very solid FID plan for the next five years. West Africa is coming back very strongly with a good balance between West African oil projects and some very large FIDs on the gas side in East Africa, which is very exciting. The other area that we are seeing as a new frontier for the offshore is the East Med and Turkey. So, we have large projects there that will provide the gas for Europe, and this should be accelerating in the next two to five years.

What’s the roadmap for the offshore industry in the near term?

I believe there are several elements that will enable the success of the offshore industry in the next five years—first of these is performance. We are working very closely with our customers to drive new levels of performance and efficiency in field developments offshore. The second element is innovation. We are very clear in our fit-for-offshore strategy, in terms of project development, and we are working very close with our customers to have joint innovation projects together where we are going to address some of the challenges we have offshore. The third element is the digital industrialization that we need to have in offshore to improve efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint. And finally, we need to have a collaborative ecosystem. The industry now is going for more and more complex projects in some new frontiers that will require a big collaboration across the stakeholders in the offshore industry.

Want more insights from Schlumberger? Visit Slb.com/Insights