Discovering New Reserves

Total devotes sizable capital expenditure budgets to exploration: $1.8 billion in 2010.
Our exploration strategy can be summed up in two words:

• "Around" means exploring around and underneath existing fields, especially by drilling deeper to reach hard-to-produce reservoirs, at extreme pressures and temperatures.
• "Larger" means hunting the "big cats," or reserves of more than 200 million barrels, and "elephants," defined as having more than 500 million barrels. It means scouting every possibility, by exploring the deep offshore and also onshore prospects. For that we are counting on geophysics, especially seismic surveys, in little explored places such as onshore-to-offshore transition areas and foothills.

We rely on a battery of tailor-made tools for seismic acquisition and imaging, geological interpretation, reservoir modeling and production simulation. The data obtained thanks to our constantly refreshed skills and expertise, coupled with steady growth in our computing capacity, enable us to better identify the acreage that will provide the world's future resources and to target our exploratory drilling accordingly.

Developing Partnerships

We are securing our reserve replacement by other means as well :

• by gaining access to resources already discovered by other industry players and developing them together;
• by acquiring resources;
• by establishing partnerships with host countries and their national oil companies. This is a cornerstone of our business model. However, the energy context is changing. Producing countries today are less eager to share access to their reserves. Competition among oil companies is becoming more intense due partly to the advent of oil companies from emerging countries.
  

To stand out from our competitors, we must prove to host countries and their national oil companies that we establish enduring, win-win relationships wherever we operate.

We are leveraging some key strengths to prove our point :

• the technical expertise to sustain resource production for as long as possible on behalf of host countries and the know-how to help them maximize the value of resources long deemed technically unrecoverable;
  
• a demonstrated ability to develop projects taking the needs of people and the environment into account, spurring local economic growth and contributing to human development wherever we operate.
  

This approach has earned us several decades of presence in Indonesia, Angola, Qatar and Abu Dhabi for example.