| North Sea oil was discovered in the early 1960s, with the first North Sea oil coming on line in 1971 and being piped ashore at Teesside, England, from 1975, but the fields were not intensively exploited until rising oil prices in the 1980s made exploitation economically feasible. Inaccessibility and dangerous conditions offshore require complex and expensive production methods.In reality, oil seeps had been known from coal beds on either side of the North Sea, but only a limited amount of development had occurred (Eakring oil field, Nottinghamshire, England; Edinburgh Oil Shales (which seem unrelated to later discoveries); and small discoveries in the Netherlands and Northern Germany). A "demonstration well" was sunk in 1938 in association with the "World Petroleum Congress" at The Hague. After the Second World War a small number of onshore gas and oil fields were found in In 1959, an academic well drilled at Ten Boer near Groningen, Netherlands was deepened and discovered a significant gas deposit. Appraisal and development wells over the next few years brought the realisation in 1963 that the Groningen field was not just "economic", nor even "big", or "large", or "giant", but was an "elephant" field of huge potential. Given that, extending exploration into adjacent areas was a "no-brain" decision.The exploration of the North Sea has been a story of continually pushing the edges of the technology of exploitation (in terms of what can be produced) and later the technologies of discovery and evaluation (2-D seismic, followed by 3-D and 4-D seismic; sub-salt seismic; immersive display and analysis suites and supercomputing to handle the flood of computation required). Name |  |