Dear Geoscience Community,

I feel awkward. I don’t know how to say this. We’ve been together a long time but we’ve also grown so much. That’s why it hurts me when I say: It’s not me, it’s you… I’m sorry.

Such a shock, right? How can I not think exploration is fun? Prospecting. Finding new plays. Doing science! Getting core!! Licking rocks!!! Our industry NEEDS this.

Unless you are offshore or international or have a lot of personal money to drill your own prospects, no- no one cares. The model pre 2005 was very human intensive, involved drilling a lot of bad wells and – quite frankly – all the cheap oil from that era has been produced. That’s why oil production was in decline until the shale revolution.

Bottom line: Public companies can’t do exploration in the US and they SHOULDN’T. Doing exploration would be like Tesla building combustion engines (exactly!). We know investors are tired of management teams wasting their money and they want it back. Exploration is not giving it back (some of the recent “discoveries” – Bakken lite, Eagleford East and “Towering Mountains” (alias) have had open economic questions- to say the least- which proves the point).

So. Like a band-aid being ripped off – let’s do this. Say it with me: “geosteering is fun!”