Attila graduated from Gubkin University of Moscow, Russia in petroleum engineering in 1989. He has an MBA from Budapest University of Economic Sciences as well. He joined MOL (BDP:MOL) as a production engineer in 1989. He worked in different leading positions in production, operational maintenance and investment until 1999. He headed a Hungarian-Kazakh joint venture, and represented at the same time MOL in Atyrau, Kazakhstan between 1994 and 1995. Since 1999 he held different mid and top level managerial positions in the domestic production and exploration. He is responsible for Hungarian and Russian E&P activities of MOL, as managing director of Eurasian E&P. MOL Group is an integrated oil and gas group in Hungary. In addition to Hungary, the company is present in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa region, as also in the CIS countries, with interests in exploration, production, refining, marketing and petrochemicals. MOL Group’s upstream operations expands in Central Europe, the CIS countries, Middle East and North Africa.
Ross Stewart Campbell (RSC) from The Oil Council: Attila thanks for joining us. There are a number of topics that I wanted to discuss with you today but if I may I’d like to start with exploration. As we move into a world where all the ‘easy oil’ has been found, E&P companies are facing a raft of new challenges when looking to find and extract oil and gas in increasingly far flung locations and complex environments. In your opinion what are the biggest exploration challenges facing oil and gas companies and how are MOL planning on overcoming these?
Attila Holoda (AH) from MOL: Ross, the oil industry in the first decade of the 21st century faces a range of new challenges in the replacement of hydrocarbon reserves. In competing for exploration areas, companies have witnessed that the sizes of conventional field discoveries tend to be smaller and smaller, while they are forced to execute work programs and to perform operations in harder and tougher environments.
Two good examples of this phenomenon are the activities carried out in deep or ultra-deep off-shore and arctic conditions. But apart from the climatic and geographical hardships, safety risks are also now increasingly high on the agenda to a certain degree. Despite intense conventional and unconventional exploratory activities these days, currently 65% of the global crude oil production still comes from fields which have a production history of more…
