ACT-GEO founder projects 20% success rate for Korean oil and gas exploration

Vitor Abreu, founder of U.S. consulting firm ACT-GEO, speaks at a press briefing to explain about Korea's potential oil discovery at a governmental complex in Sejong on Friday. [YONHAP]

Vitor Abreu, founder of ACT-GEO, which is behind the claim of Korea’s potential discovery of large gas and oil reserves, projects a 20 percent chance of success for the exploration project.

“Twenty percent is very good in a frontier basin,” Abreu said at a press briefing held in Sejong on Friday to explain his company’s findings. “The largest discovery in the world in the last 20 or 25 years is the Liza prospect in Guyana. I participated in that project when I was working for Exxon Mobil. The prospect for the Liza oil field was 16 percent.”

The Liza oil field refers to a discovery in 2015 located offshore Guyana, approximately 190 kilometers (118 miles) northeast of Georgetown.

“The quick summary is that Liza found 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil,” Abreu said.

Based on ACT-GEO’s analysis, Abreu claims that there are seven prospects that could hold between 3.5 billion to 14 billion barrels of oil and gas buried in the waters around Yeongil Bay in Pohang, North Gyeongsang.

Regarding a question about whether the 20 percent probability was high, Abreu clarified that the chances are still risky.

“Twenty percent means that there’s an 80 percent chance that it will not work,” he said. “If there was only one prospect out there, I probably wouldn’t want to drill it. What this means is that if I have five prospects, I will find oil in one of them.”

“The only way to test now is by drilling,” Abreu continued. “They [the prospects] showed all the elements. There’s still a risk, but it’s an unavoidable risk at this point. So the only way to mitigate it is by drilling.”

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]