Deep water is the hottest, fastest-growing play in the exploration universe, and some operators already call it mature, complain that the best prospects already have been found and say that the remaining discoveries will be smaller and more technically challenging. They even say the semi-sacred "golden triangle"-the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil and West Africa-is no longer golden. The industry is moving away from the golden triangle, according to Duncan Clarke, chairman and chief executive officer of Global Pacific Partners International, London. He spoke at the firm's Global Deepwater Strategies conference in Houston recently. New areas of exploration are Gambia, Senegal, Portugal, Suriname, French Guiana, Trinidad, the Mediterranean, Shetland Islands and the Faroes, he added. Exploration experts are looking at deepwater Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, New Zealand, India and Brunei. Majors and independents alike are looking in new areas, because "the easy exploration is now over," said Jean-Paul Monjarret, vice president of geoservices, new business, Total SA. From 1993-2001, the industry discovered giants in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Guinea, Campos Basin, Africa, Norway, the North West Shelf of Australia, Egypt, the Cote d'Ivoire and Indonesia using 3-D seismic, he said. After 2001, Total has seen no new zones of interest in Africa. Since 1996, reserves increased rapidly with easy discoveries. Since 1999, however, the volumes of those discoveries have been lower. The firm sees frontier plays as the main hope for the future along with technically challenged high-temperature/high-pressure formations and subsalt plays. Richard Sears, vice president of global technology services for Shell International E&P Inc., agrees that further discoveries will be more difficult, but adds that the industry is up to the challenge. He puts world deepwater resource potential at more than 150 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) with a range above 100 billion and below 1 trillion. About 57 billion has been discovered to date leaving more than half the resource yet to be found. That means deep water is an immature play, he said. Of the 57 billion BOE only 15 billion is on production and only 4 billion of that number has been produced. -Don Lyle