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The U.S. geoscience exploration firm working in South Korea’s East Sea has discovered 14 additional oil and gas prospects in the area, South Korean officials said on Monday.
U.S. exploration firm Act-Geo has said in a report to the Korea National Oil Corp. (KNOC) that it had detected these possible resources, the South Korean Yonhap news agency reported, quoting officials from KNOC and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.
According to Act-Geo, 14 additional oil and gas prospects could be found in the East Sea, with potential deposits of between 680 million barrels and 5.17 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent, the Korean officials said.
The company’s findings are preliminary and are yet to be confirmed by more experts, the officials added.
Last year, Act-Geo said that exploration prospects offshore South Korea have great potential and a future discovery is “highly prospective.”
In June 2024, South Korea endorsed a plan for drilling off the east coast of one of the world’s largest oil and gas importers, to explore what studies say are potentially vast resources of crude oil and natural gas.
The area could contain 14 billion barrels of oil and gas, the country’s top officials said at the time.
Vitor Abreu, co-founder and adviser of Act-Geo, said last year that the initial survey results had already attracted the attention of “important international companies.”
South Korea hopes to find resources by the middle of this year. Commercial production is targeted for 2035 for the exploratory prospects, the larger part of which are estimated to contain natural gas.
South Korea imports nearly all the fossil fuels it consumes, so domestic production of oil and gas could go a long way to meet some of the demand.
The country is the fourth-largest importer of crude oil and natural gas in the world, KNOC says. South Korea is also the world’s ninth-biggest energy consumer.
