What is waiting in the wings to be the Next Great Thing?
there are those you hear about and those you don't.
The Vaca Muerta is already producing but is hampered by lack of proper regulations, lack of a competitive service industry and slow approvals in some of the provinces. The acreage is now held by about 6 or 7 companies with little in the way of drilling commitments forcing activity. Hence the pace is a lot slower than we saw in the US where there was huge competition amongst service companies and negotiations with royalty land holders forced a drilling schedule that was pretty aggressive. It is definitely economically produceable and once all the infrastructure is in place it will be very significant, especially in a country where they have been paying anywhere from $9 to $14 per MMBTU to import gas and LNG.
In the background and not well known to those who never worked there Algeria has been quietly developing shale gas and liquids in the Devonian and Silurian sources rocks for a number of years. The shale basins are immense but little is known about the extent of some of the production they have gotten from theses zones (Haliburton reported a few years ago on a couple of vertical wells that Sonatrach completed in the Devonian Meden Yaha Fm which produced at rates 6 - 8 times typical shale gas wells in the US. There is lots of infrastructure around, access to water (huge acquifer here) and Sonatrach basically owns it all (hence no rush to develop it nor any rush to make press releases).
Aramco has been gradually testing some of the deeper shales along with their deep Permian conventional Khuff gas project. Although the search for conventional gas in the Rub Al Khali has been less than exciting there is extensive shale deposits that match well with counterparts in the US and have tested gas. Recently SA has been pushing for more and more gas for their energy needs which will see an increase in activity in the unconventional side of things. They definitely have all the services they need to accomplish this it is really a will/need to be aggressive.
The same Silurian shales that are present in Algeria and provide a source for much of the discovered hydrocarbons are also present in the onshore Sirte Basin in Libya. Wells drilling to the basal Nubian sands in the basin have tested gas from these shales in the past. There has been almost zero exploration activity in Libya for the past 10 years and things don't look like they will change quickly but the resource is definitely there.
Northwest China Tarim basin is also a key area. The Chinese have been quite active there but do not report anything so at this point anyones guess is as good as the others. It is a huge area and the rock quality certainly compares with that from the better US basins.