By Marco Alfieri on October 5, 2015
Like all great exploration discoveries also the Zohr discovery is full of surprises, the unexpected, intuitions, mistakes, skill, enthusiasm, and ups and downs in which the human element is as crucial as the technology. It’s a story worth telling from the beginning because we already know what Eni has found in the Egyptian offshore and the geopolitical impact on the area, but still very little about how we arrived at this mega-discovery. A three-year journey – together with an extraordinary team of geologists, geophysicists, drilling engineers and logistics specialists, experts in ICT and economic evaluations – that it was was to tell from the inside…
Like all great exploration discoveries also the Zohr discovery is full of surprises, the unexpected, intuitions, mistakes, skill, enthusiasm, and ups and downs in which the human element is as crucial as the technology. It’s a story worth telling from the beginning because we already know what Eni has found in the Egyptian offshore and the geopolitical impact on the area, but still very little about how we arrived at this mega-discovery. A three-year journey – together with an extraordinary team of geologists, geophysicists, drilling engineers and logistics specialists, experts in ICT and economic evaluations – that it was was to tell from the inside…
“The truth? I’ve never seen more than 600 metres of gas permeated rock with pressure points so aligned..” my new explorer friend tells.
While he speaks his small eyes flash with emotion and adrenaline. It’s a warm September afternoon, we are sitting in an empty room in San Donato, a long way from the Egyptian platforms, but it feels as if we are in one of those construction site containers, between excitement and curiosity.
Like all great exploration discoveries also the Zohr discovery is full of surprises, the unexpected, intuitions, mistakes, skill, enthusiasm, and ups and downs in which the human element is as crucial as the technology.
It’s a story worth telling from the beginning because we already know what Eni has found in the Egyptian offshore, the potential of the discovery, the geopolitical impact on the area and the possible developments of the system (a Mediterranean gas hub), but still very little about how we arrived at this mega-discovery. How the teams in Egypt and San Donato worked for three long years, what were the decisive moments, the difficulties and the diffidence that were overcome.
Making a discovery is like winning a football championship. It takes patience, method, tenacity, talent, expertise, firmness, team work, vision, cold blood (and a warm heart, always).
Often, we journalists like to tell it as if it were the final of the Uefa Champions League. With soccer stars like Andrea Pirlo or Leo Messi, dribbling round the defence and going for goal with the ball. But this risks trivializing, simplifying or over-personalising.
“Meet the man who discovered …” blah blah blah …
But that’s not how it works.
One of the first things my explorer friend told me was even disarmingly: “We are not like Indiana Jones as some people imagine. We don’t have a whip, we don’t consult miraculous algorithms nor do we whisper to stones … ”
Each discovery is the result of the geological knowledge and insights of a great team. The whole company is involved and bings its contribution: those who explore, drill, develop the wells, those people in IT, those who make economic evaluations, and on up to the top management.
This is why a premise is necessary.
The story of Zohr began in mid-2012 when Egas, the Egyptian state exploration agency for the offshore Nile Delta, announced a competitive bid, or “bid round” to use the technical term, in the Mediterranean offshore, with the offer to oil companies of 15 blocks to be evaluated.
Politically the period was full of uncertainty, it was the post-Arab Spring. In Cairo in June the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, and the major oil companies were having difficulty in collecting the arrears due to them. Eni decided to keep a regional base in Egypt and continue to study, from a geological point of view, the area of the Levantine basin.
For as long as possible, the first rule of an energy company is that contingent and geopolitical factors should never make you stop searching (and trying to understand). Oil is a long-term business; tomorrow things can be different, maybe even better.
But there is a second factor. The IEOC, historically the driver of exploration activities in Egypt, for the first time in forty years was about to run out of areas to explore. Uncertainty, as Mao Tse Tung would have said, is an excellent opportunity to try to reconstruct the portfolio with more or less limited investment (the competition would be low), pending an improvement in the conditions for investing in the country.
Source: http://www.eniday.com/en/nessun-dorma/
