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Some years back, the leading engineer Sextus Julius Frontius said the following: “New inventions have reached their maximum long time ago, and I see no hope for further development in inventions”. He was a Roman, and this was 2000 years ago. Napoleon thought that the Fultons steamboats were a rather silly idea, and Professor Lardner explained in 1830 that the idea of high speed trains was impossible, because people would die by choking due to lack of oxygene. In 1878, Professor Wilson from Oxford University said that electric light would never become popular – and The Times wrote in 1903 that it was impossible to make maschines fly. A few weeks later, the Wright brothers actually proved that it could be done. Leading authorities have rejected the value and significance of almost all of our rather popular technologies such as electrical power, radios, telephones, home computers etc. When John von Neumann had been part of inventing the electrical computer, he said: “It certainly looks like we have reached the limit for what is possible to reach within computer technology”. That was in 1949, and since then, computers are now 10.000 BILLION times faster. The same goes with our business. There are certain well-known and very established truths, and there was once where the Barents Sea was a gas basin. There was also a few weeks ago, when only few believed that there would be discovered oil in the outer Vøring Basin. The idea of having a regional conference on Underexplored Plays came from a discussion after the Pil and Bue discoveries, where we discussed the little number of courageous wells, really trying to test new ideas. There are less wells drilled in the Norwegian sector than in the UK sector for various reasons, but Norway has a tailormade tax regime for drilling high risk exploration wells. So the first hypothesis was that it was lack of creativity and innovation, but after a month of gathering ideas from the networks, we had a list of 100 specific topics to chase. We simply asked people for their forgotten favorites, the prospects that was overlooked, perhaps because other wells in the global portfolio had a higher chance of success, or maybe because the proposed play concept was belonging to the “High Risk Category”, that is often written off by management. We asked people about topics that should be revived on an Underexplored Plays conference, and we got proposals covering the entire stratigraphy. Hence, we concluded that it was not a conference on innovation that was needed. There are plenty of creative ideas in the industry, and we had plenty of talks for an entire week, but we have limited ourselves to a two-day conference – including a core workshop. What we try to achieve with those two days is to inspire you. Maybe you’ll find out something you hadn’t thought of before, maybe you will see something that added just that element to your understanding that makes it fall into place and lead to development of a new concept? We must also acknowledge that there are younger people in the industry that might not have heard the old story of a certain discovery, because everybody knows it and assumes that everybody else does. Hence, we have brought in some ‘old stories’ that deserves a little bit of attention. And new ones. You will for example be introduced to the rather unknown Zechstein story in the Johan Sverdrup license, you will learn about the results of the recent Jordbær well, you will learn that milliDarcies of the North Sea Cretaceous Chalk are quite all right, you will learn of the Paleocene outcrops of NE Greenland, which might be representative for the new play proven by the Pingvin well – and Dag Karlsen will share the learnings of his long career and present his understanding of the petroleum systems on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. We’ll also learn about why porosity is preserved at great depth at the Beta discovery, where an appraisal well is currently being drilled – and then the Nordland Ridge will receive a little well deserved attention. And since a company presented a few leads and a proven petroleum system in Helgeland Basin at the Exploration Revived conference, maybe more oil companies will be active there in near future? Furthermore, in UK, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has recently concluded that 20% of the remaining undiscovered resources are to be found in basement. That is a play that has just been touched upon here in Norway, but maybe we can learn from them? Lundin has been kind to present the geophysical aspects of visualising weathered basement, together with putting one of their cores on display, so we hope that we will learn a lot from that. All in all: thank you all for coming to this conference. We in the Organising Committe are proud of the program – and we hope you will learn a lot from these two days. Maybe you’ll be inspired and bring knowledge back with you and revitalise one of these Underexplored Plays? If you have been inspired, then we have achieved what we wanted. In the first session, we thought it would be useful to have NPD outlining their visions for the plays that they consider underexplored – and indicate which direction they want us to go. And then it would be useful to put things in a more regional perspective, and compare the current state of the Norwegian Continental Shelf with our neighbouring countries. It is also crucial to understand the differences in infrastructure and fiscal regimes – meaning tax – and get a feel for what lies ahead of us, now we have found the easy hydrocarbons. And some of the more difficult ones. Stratigraphic trap types do have a higher risk, but we probably have to face that we have to drill more of these trap types in the future. We have invited Gaffney, Cline and Associates to present an overview and comparison between the proven plays in UK versus Norwegian sector, where they will give us a flavour for what lies ahead of us. They are experts on both the UK and Norwegian side of the North Sea and can share some of their overview and insight in the business.