Resources and resourcefulness

Abstract

Let me start by commending your conference theme. Longer-term oil supply will require a balance between ‘old’ and ‘new’ oil: between

• increasingly difficult oil from mature areas;

• frontier oil; and

• optimum production from major resource holders.

A key to this balance is technology — under which I include technical, managerial and financial/commercial expertise. In my first two categories — mature areas and frontier provinces — technology can reduce inherently high-cost oil. In the third — the major resource holders — it can help make affordable the increased production that will be needed. In doing so, technology could catalyse greater co-operation in the oil industry: between the resources of the major hydrocarbon holders, and the resourcefulness — if one might call it that 002D of the private industry.

At the time this paper was presented, Mark Moody-Stuart was Group managing director and Exploration and Production co-ordinator for the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies. Since then he relinquished the role of Exploration and Production coordinator but remains a Group managing director.

Keynote address to the American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ International Conference ‘New views on old world oil — Technology leads the way’ The Hague, 18 October 1993.