Abstract

New important gas production from shale in the US has made it a credible competitor to gas production from APC region. This together with the drop in crude oil price by more than 50% since late 2014 has totally changed the E&P context worldwide and definitively also in Asia Pacific. Consequently, several gas development projects have been suspended or cancelled in Australia and other countries. This has a direct impact on exploration in this very gas-rich area.

Parallel to this changing exploration context, Total re-organized its exploration, shifting strategy from high-risk/high reward frontier exploration to a more balanced one including near-by, emerging and frontier domains. This new strategy is associated with a new organization of “exploration hubs” with the APC Exploration team now fully based in Singapore by grouping all previous teams from France and regional subsidiaries.

Being based in Singapore for APC and in Houston for the Americas is a new business opportunity for Total to be closer to its major stakeholders as government regulators, NOC and others international oil and gas companies. It also provides synergies with other branches of Total as lubricants, marketing and services and refining are also based in Singapore.

With this new strength related to a new fully accountable Exploration entity in Region together with strong historical roots in countries as Indonesia, Myanmar, Brunei or Thailand, Total has the full capacity of generating new exploration opportunities in the upcoming years.

Initially the exploration efforts will be focused on two countries, Myanmar and Papua New Guinea: in the former country near-by exploration around the Yadana Field is planned and recently Total entered in several blocks as partner or operator (YWB block). In the latter country, exciting prospects are being matured for drilling in 2017/2018 be it near-by exploration around the Elk/Antelope gas asset onshore, but also in the Gulf of Papua or in the Coral Sea.

In other countries focus will be on creating value from exploration around our existing production infrastructures as in Thailand, Australia or Brunei but we will stay open to any others high value-creation opportunity.

In addition to an overall reduced exploration budget, new regional exploration organization will also lead us to compete for budget and be more and more selective on high value creation opportunities only. Hundreds of sedimentary basin exist in the region, the majority of which remain under-explored.