Abstract: The international oil companies have adhered to a long-term exploration strategy of implementing risk exploration in global frontier domains to achieve substantial investment returns. However, there are considerable differences in their focus and implementation performance of risk exploration among various companies. In order to study the risk exploration strategies, risk exploration preferences, and implementation performance of foreign oil companies, and to guide the overseas petroleum exploration work of Chinese oil companies, oil company annual reports, public information and commercial database are used to analyze risk exploration projects of eight foreign oil companies during 2005–2022. As a result, an evaluation indicator system for project implementation performance has been established, including four primary indicators such as exploration benefits, exploration investment, project scale, and risk control, as well as 19 secondary individual indicators. The benchmarking of individual and comprehensive indicators is conducted, and the effectiveness and experience in risk exploration of the benchmarking companies are analyzed. The study results show that there are significant differences in the individual indicators among oil companies, which are closely related to their exploration strategies and risk exploration preference. ExxonMobil scores the highest in comprehensive evaluation indicators, while BP has relatively low score due to the small number of operator risk projects and a lack of major commercial discoveries. Based on the research findings, insights in five aspects have been concluded for overseas risk exploration of Chinese oil companies, including emphasizing exploration benefits, actively operating as a risk exploration project operator, maintaining certain project scale and investment, appropriately controlling project equity, and formulating risk exploration strategies that align with company characteristics. These suggestions are of important practical significance and have long-term strategic value in guiding the development of overseas petroleum exploration strategies and risk exploration policies for Chinese oil companies.

Key words: risk exploration project, exploration benefit, exploration investment, project scale, risk control, foreign oil company, strategic suggestion