Letter from Canada: Last chance for Newfoundland offshore

The province has potential, but it needs big finds and it needs them fast

Newfoundland has long been a plodder in the global offshore oil industry, even though the Canadian province has some highly prospective rock and the provincial energy bureaucracy significantly professionalising over the past decade. Since its inception in 1966, only 170 exploration wells have been drilled in Newfoundland offshore waters, despite its sedimentary basin being 50pc larger than the US Gulf of Mexico and three-quarters the size of the North Sea. The Hibernia field is the only discovery with greater than 1bn bl of recoverable oil, with all the rest substantially smaller. Production peaked at a relatively modest 368,000bl/d in 2007—from Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose—dropping t