Pioneering and entrepreneurial

"Our ambition continues to grow and this drives Tullow's exploration team to keep 'moving the needle' in delivering shareholder value."

Angus McCoss, Exploration Director

Building scale, not complexity

We focus on the areas and geologies we know best. Our portfolio of regionally related basins, gives us a broad foundation for risk-mitigated growth with lots of follow-up potential.

We aim to discover and delineate material commercial volumes of high-value oil in our focus areas and within our core geological plays. We focus on rift basins, stratigraphic traps and salt basins. These are straightforward plays, proven by our industry to be prolific in hydrocarbons.

Our pioneering approach to exploration comes from the team's collective geological capabilities and technical excellence that is recognised in the industry.

Our exploration focus is clear. We aim to grow in Africa, expand and replicate our successes in South America, build on our North Atlantic position and mature our Asian acreage.

Continue to grow in Africa

West Africa continues to be a highly successful exploration area for us. We have had excellent results to the west of Jubilee at Tweneboa and Enyenra and have extended the Jubilee play further westwards with encouraging results in the Liberian Basin at Venus and more recently in the Mercury-1 well in Sierra Leone. These results underpin the extent and strategic global importance of this exploration breakthrough.

The successful Cormoran-1 well in northern offshore Mauritania gives us growing confidence about the continuation of the Jubilee play further along the 3,000 km long West African Mauri-Tano Trend. The Mauri-Tano Trend extends from Mauritania, southwards through Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire to the Tano basin offshore Ghana. It is currently the most material and prospective trend in our African exploration portfolio. The high-impact Cobalt prospect will be drilled by the high-risk wildcat Montserrado-1 well in Liberia later in 2011.

The East African Rifts are also very important for Tullow. They include the prolific Lake Albert Rift Basin in Uganda and extend across a series of rift basins through Western Kenya into Southern Ethiopia.

The Lake Albert Rift Basin has yielded 1 billion barrels of discovered oil (P50) and could potentially yield a further 1.5 billion barrels (P50) to 2.5 billion barrels (P10) through further exploration and appraisal programmes.

We are finding and sampling oil seeping from the Kenya-Ethiopia Rift Basin prospects and this makes it clear that this is a working petroleum system. In 1992 oil was discovered in the acreage. Our challenge, however, is to turn these geological clues into worthy prospects for drilling.

Further to the east, we have a position on the East Africa Transform Margin comprising onshore acreage in the Rovuma Basin in Tanzania. Our exploration strategy here focuses on finding oil in what is considered to be a gas-prone province.

Geological field work in 2010 in the Morondava Basin in south western Madagascar has been rewarding and the sampling of oil has helped us to refine which plays we should target.

We are also pursuing established oil plays in Gabon, extending the economic utilisation of infrastructure, albeit with smaller prospects and volumes of oil.

Expand and replicate success in South America

We are leading the pursuit of the Jubilee play across the Equatorial Atlantic region off the coast of South America. We are focused on Upper Cretaceous deep-water turbidite fans that appear to be remarkably similar to those on the African side of Equatorial Atlantic Region.

We are drilling a strategic deepwater basin-testing well on the Zaedyus prospect in French Guiana. We are targeting the similar, but deeper, Jaguar prospect in shallower water, offshore Guyana.

Build on our North Atlantic position

Our geological knowledge and experience reveals clear opportunities in the North Atlantic. There are near-field opportunities in satellite prospects which extend the life of existing infrastructure and there are breakthrough plays in relatively under-explored areas, including the North Sea.

Mature opportunities in Asia

In Asia, our high-potential exploration acreage sits in Pakistan, in the eastern part of the prolific Tethys Trend, which extends to Kurdistan in the west. This is a low-cost, high-impact part of our exploration portfolio which is being gradually matured as security improves.

Moving the needle

Tullow's exploration strategy is founded on basic principles and is focused on finding high-value oil in material commercial quantities. Over the years our strategy has evolved through building scale, not by adding complexity. We have pushed Tullow's exploration efforts gradually from simple prospects, through plays and basins, to our current 'needle moving' inventory of highly prospective trends of basins that have regional scale.