GoKawiilAs fossil-fuel supplies from the Middle East remain disrupted after the US–Israel strikes on Iran, a dilemma has become clear. The world’s economies are heavily reliant on oil and natural gas. Yet, in the long run, they must shift to low-carbon forms of energy, such as solar and wind, to avert the worst effects of global warming. The question is, what happens during the transition? For the next decade, at least, natural gas will be crucial for meeting rising energy demands, filling gaps when renewable sources are intermittent and powering artificial intelligence.
Where will this gas come from? As older onshore and offshore fossil-fuel resources mature and become less productive, a new frontier is opening — the deep sea. Once hard to access, technological advances now make oil and gas exploration feasible hundreds of metres below the sea bed in waters that are thousands of metres deep. Searches extend even to the abyssal zone: the pitch-black, near-freezing layer of the ocean, 4,000–6,000 metres below the surface.
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Investments in deep offshore oil and gas developments are growing fast — exceeding US$200 billion in 2026, double the average for the past decade. Around $2.5 trillion is expected to be spent on deep-sea drilling between 2026 and 2035.
But the deep sea is also fragile: remote and under-observed scientifically, ecologically slow to recover, risky to operate in and legally difficult to govern. The farther the oil and gas industry ventures from shore and beneath the waves, the harder it is to enforce inspection, liability and restoration requirements.
The central question is not whether the deep sea should be open to extraction — these resources are crucial for energy security (see ‘Energy trends’). But that alone cannot justify biodiversity loss being an acceptable operating cost.
Sources: Top: Energy Institute - Statistical Review of World Energy (June 2025); Bottom: Global Energy Monitor’s Global Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker (February 2025).
Here, I outline how a balance can be achieved. Projects should be justified on a case-by-case basis, and only when operators can show that ecological harm can be avoided, emissions can be independently verified, failures can be contained and responsibility will outlast production.
Ocean drilling boom
Advances in ocean drilling are redrawing the global energy map. Over the past decade, waters that are classed as deep (around 400 metres) have yielded more than 70% of ‘proven and probable’ reserves discovered by the seven largest publicly traded, investor-owned international oil companies. Discoveries in deep-water reservoirs are, on average, 16 times larger than those onshore.
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