What's Ahead - Anthony Onukwu previews articles on emerging oil and gas regions.
Welcome to the first issue of 2011. As always, we are looking ahead and, in this issue, TWA brings you another interesting theme, with some exciting articles on emerging oil and gas regions.
When German scientist Alfred Wegener put forward the idea that the geographic fit of the western coast of Africa and the eastern coast of South America had once been joined together in the geological past. Most people would have thought it was a myth, but advances in marine geology over the next 40 years led to the recognition that the two continents had separated at the end of the Jurassic and the very beginning of the Cretaceous periods by a process of rifting and oceanic suturing. Today, deepwater Brazil is the rising star in the Western Hemisphere for the oil and gas industry after the offshore finds in pre-salt, and deepwater west Africa—also with salt body structures—has achieved huge success in recent years. The number of fields is expected to increase fivefold by 2013. It is the immense promise of the giant deepwater “elephant” fields that is fueling the current boom in exploration and development and raising the levels of investment in these regions.
