Development

Imagine you have confirmed there is genuinely enough gold in your backyard to justify a proper mining operation. The next step is not more digging around, it is building the actual infrastructure, shafts, equipment, roads, to extract it at scale. Development is that equivalent stage in the oil and gas world.

Once exploration and appraisal confirm a commercially viable discovery, development involves drilling the production wells, and building the pipelines, processing facilities and surface infrastructure needed to bring the field into full operation. This phase requires the largest capital outlay in the entire upstream cycle, and companies typically submit a formal Field Development Plan to the regulator before proceeding, laying out the technical and financial roadmap for bringing the field online.

A field can sit for years between confirmed discovery and actual development, which is exactly the gap the DSF policy was designed to close for smaller, previously shelved discoveries.