A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions reads the dry water bore as a research result and asks what paying for its disclosure changes on the holdings around it.
An economic reading of one basin's drilling rebate asks what a neighbour does with a result its owner could not use
We are grateful to everyone who has ever drilled in the wrong place and said so. It is a generous thing to do with a disappointment, and the School would like it known that somebody was keeping count.
— Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions
Dr Emenike is lead author of The Dry Hole Next Door: Lodged bore logs, a conditional drilling rebate, and the reach of a negative result, a research poster prepared with Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Underlying Conditions, and Iben Chikere, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities. It brings the economics of innovation onto ground the School already knows.
The poster considers a rebate on exploratory drilling that is paid only once the driller’s log has been lodged on an open register, and follows 1,184 bores on 903 holdings to see what the surrounding holdings did next. Close to a lodged dry bore, further dry bores became markedly less likely for a time; at a distance, and after two years, the difference had largely gone. The amount of drilling did not change. Its whereabouts did.
The University considers the poster a careful addition to its standing interest in what is learned by not finding anything. Dr Obiora said the team had been struck by how much of the work consisted of “establishing where a piece of knowledge stops, which is a question this School has always felt at home with”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.u9mrvv.