Australia – how do we compare as an exploration destination?

Abstract

A country’s competitiveness as a destination to conduct oil and gas exploration and production operations can be assessed through analysis of key metrics including discovered volumes, new field wildcat success rate, average field size, discovered volumes per new field wildcat, fiscal terms, sanctity of contract, regulatory burden and civil society risk. When compared globally, Australia ranks very high for aboveground risk factors, well for discovered volumes and discovered volumes per new field wildcat but sits towards the lower end of the dataset for fiscal terms. When assigning each metric a score on a scale of 1–10 and appropriately weighting and combining them to produce one overall score for each country, Australia currently ranks fourteenth for offshore and sixth for onshore. Historically, Australia’s rankings have been relatively consistent and have not dropped below twentieth since 2006. Conducting this analysis at a basin level allows the introduction of ‘time to onstream’ and ‘yet to find’ as additional metrics. Of the Australian immature basins, the McArthur Basin has the highest ranking; and for moderately mature basins, the North Carnarvon Basin tops the list.