As we enter this new century, we appear to be somewhat adrift in exploration, if not in geology. Indeed, we can ask, "Where are the great 'end-of-century' explorationists―the ones at the front end driving us forward today?" The worry is, of course, that many of us have already made our contribution―but where is that next generation of explorationists? Alas, they probably haven't even come into our business, because our industry, like all the earth sciences and natural-resources businesses, has found it more and more difficult to attract the very best as our position in the public perception has continued to deteriorate. Indeed, the position of the explorationist and the geologist in oil companies has deteriorated in the past years. Even in the large national oil companies, with huge exploration possibilities, the role of the exploration manager or the senior geologist seems to have been reduced and perceptions of them diminished. So in a sense, you can say "we lost the plot" somewhere in the period from the late 1970s perhaps to the middle 1980s―perhaps because of oil price, perhaps because we didn't find some of the big fields that we hoped to find, perhaps (in that terrible period from about 1987 to 1994) because we failed to recognize that 3-D seismic, good though it is, doesn't change the distribution of field sizes in nature and doesn't make those big billion-barrel fields easier to find in practice. Whatever the reasons, if we face the facts, somehow in this period we lost the plot. So we do have some responsibility for our current situation. Let us not dwell on it any more right now. For the moment, let us look back on that marvelous century gone by―almost a fable―when there were real explorationists in this world.
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