The State of Exploration 2026

Part 1 – High Impact Exploration Drilling provides an overview of high impact exploration drilling performance and significant discoveries in 2025. It then assesses high impact exploration performance over the last five years, and reviews high impact exploration in frontier and emerging plays.

Part 2 – High Impact Exploration Company Benchmarking analyses the activity, performance and portfolio of the key companies involved in high impact exploration drilling in 2021-2025, including a review of the plays targeted and performance against play base rate, as well as exploration strategy.

Part 3 – High Impact Resource Progression reviews how much of the resources discovered by high impact wells since 2010 have progressed towards development and production, and how long this has taken.

Part 4 – Offshore Exploration Seismic reviews how exploration seismic acquisition has evolved over the last decade considering the volume of data acquired, changes in technology and who has been acquiring data where as a leading indicator of future exploration drilling.

Part 5 – Offshore Exploration Acreage considers the landscape of global offshore exploration acreage, including acreage in frontier basins, and where the supermajors have been accessing acreage in recent years.

Part 6 – The Outlook for Exploration brings together all of these analyses to consider how much exploration drilling may take place over the next few years, who will be drilling where and the challenges to resource replacement.