Heading up Agora is Svein Ilebekk, who can best be described as cheerfully meticulous.
Just as much as he looks forward, he looks back, tracking every field or licence the firm has ever turned down to make sure it made the right decision.
He says not one of some 30 farm-ins rejected by the firm have since proved commercially successful. Of 12 exploration and appraisal wells Agora has been involved in, 10 have found hydrocarbons.
“One in the east Irish Sea was dry, which was a message to us to keep within our business model, and the other (Cladhan South) had to be abandoned for technical reasons,” he said.
Agora’s latest success was at Skarfjell, in which it has 20% equity, a prospect thought to contain 60-100million barrels – Ilebekk thinks higher.
It was one of the prospects owned by Revus (whose team helped create Agora in 2011 with backing from RIT and Lord Rothschild interests), which was bought by Wintershall who farmed down on it.
And so goes the tale for a number of Agora’s prospects – many of which are known through its team’s former lives at Revus and before that Enterprise Oil.
At Revus, the team had gone after the block containing the massive Johan Sverdrup, but lost out to Lundin and Statoil.
Ilebekk says the key now is challenging received wisdom that the North Sea is mature, that there is nothing left and revisiting logs and data.
Agora has near-term drilling lined up, with Kakelborg in the Norwegian sector due to spud imminently.
It has also applied for acreage in the UK’s 27th licensing round, is looking to take part in this year’s Norwegian APA round and will then consider the Norwegian 22nd round, which includes the possibility of going for Barents acreage.
“We have finished the easy phase,” says Ilebekk. “Now there are more complicated structures, more complicated drilling.”