OilCo has enhanced the province’s oil and gas potential by providing knowledge and insight to attract new investments to the oil and gas industry in offshore Newfoundland and Labrador.

Our strategy

OilCo leads the exploration of the province’s frontier and deepwater basins by strategically investing in data acquisition and analysis to evaluate Newfoundland and Labrador’s (NL) undiscovered oil and gas resource potential.

Key elements of our strategy are:

  • accelerating exploration activity in NL to identify new resources;
  • lowering policy barriers to exploration to enhance NL competitiveness;
  • positioning NL to monetize all commercial oil and gas resources;
  • increasing and quantifying portfolio of potential 10% equity stakes by finding new prospects, de-risking, and preparing for license rounds and drilling; and,
  • increasing knowledge of frontier basins from the earliest stages, which will ensure strong standing at the initial project development stage.

Over the past decade, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, through OilCo, has invested approximately $180 million to participate in geoscience data to find and evaluate offshore NL’s oil and gas potential. This investment has been leveraged with over $600 million from private data partners. This achievement of attracting foreign investment in offshore NL was recognized by the Petroleum Economist (London) Awards as OilCo was a finalist for the 2017 Exploration Company of the Year.

Exploration highlights

  • Since 2011, 180,000 line km of new 2D and 50,000 km2 of new 3D multi-client seismic data acquired.
  • Opened up new exploration plays and play trends in frontier basins.
  • Completed nine resource assessments since 2015.
  • Attracted new entrants and investments to NL. Since 2015, our work has contributed approximately $4 billion in foreign direct investment to the province.
  • Identified 20+ prospects with potential oil reserves of ~1 billion barrels of oil.
  • From external resource assessment evaluations ~18% of NL offshore acreage, cumulative estimated 123.6 billion barrels of oil and 292.6 trillion cubic feet of gas potential.
  • Mapped 650+ AVO supported leads and prospects.

Our approach

OilCo takes a systematic and scientific approach to evaluate NL’s frontier basins. Through our proprietary exploration strategy system (Insight), our team consistently evaluates all of NL’s basins (over 20) on the key elements that make up a commercial-grade petroleum deposit. This process identifies critical knowledge gaps that may exist and highlights key risks holding back industry investment.

In collaboration with the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, OilCo has engaged Beicip-Franlab to conduct detailed independent resource assessments (RA) for offshore Newfoundland and Labrador (NL). Nine RAs have been conducted since 2015. Each area covered by a RA is approximately 2% or 20,000 km2 of NL’s offshore basin area.

View our resource assessments here.