MELBOURNE: With a giant gas project expansion in the tropical highlands of remote Papua New Guinea bogged down by politics, the country’s biggest company, Oil Search, is turning for growth to the other side of the world in Alaska’s frozen wilderness.
Australia-listed but headquartered in Port Moresby, the A$10.7 billion ($7.2 billion) oil and gas producer has shaped the industry in Papua New Guinea over the past 90 years, helping drive development in the impoverished nation.
But the scale of its PNG projects has left it dependent on decisions by giant international partners, while government demands for a bigger stake in resource projects may delay a planned $13 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) expansion.
The confusion has opened a window for Oil Search to push ahead with a promising field in Alaska’s North Slope oil region that it bought into in 2018 and where it is the project operator.
Despite a steep learning curve, it plans to start producing as early as 2022 to help meet a target of doubling its annual output to around 60 million barrels of oil equivalent by 2025.
“It’s a perfect foil in terms of product diversity and geographic diversity. It’s an excellent asset in the sense that we can control it a lot better,” Oil Search Managing Director Peter Botten told Reuters in an interview.
Oil Search has parlayed its years in Papua New Guinea into a 29% stake in the PNG LNG project, led by Exxon Mobil Corp. , and a 23% stake in the Papua LNG project, led by Total SA, and has been a key player behind a plan to unite the two projects and double the country’s LNG exports.
The projects are considered among the best in the world, blessed with low costs, high quality gas, existing infrastructure and proximity to Asia markets, factors that have long made Oil Search subject to takeover speculation.
To begin production at the planned expansion by 2024, Oil Search’s partners need to give the go-ahead next year on the two projects.
One hurdle was resolved last week when the state backed down from a bid to overhaul terms with Total, but talks with Exxon to develop the P’nyang gas field, which the companies had hoped to seal by June, are yet to happen.
“You’d think they’re likely to get there quicker on Alaska than they do on PNG at this stage,” said Andy Forster, a portfolio manager at Argo Investments, which more than doubled its holding in Oil Search in the year to June 2019.
In Alaska, Oil Search has spent $850 million buying a 51% stake in the Pikka prospect on the assumption it holds 500 million barrels of recoverable oil.
With Spain’s Repsol, it aims to produce 30,000 barrels a day of oil by as early as 2022 to start generating cash, then ramp up to 120,000 bpd in 2024.
Beefing up its small staff in Alaska, the company has hired a Trump administration official who oversaw oil and gas drilling on US federal lands as its external affairs head.
It is hoping to prove up reserves closer to 750 million barrels over the next six months, find more oil around its Nanushuk field and sell part of its stake to help fund the project.
“I think the development schedule we’re working up right now is one that’s very doable,” Botten said.
Consultants Wood Mackenzie like the project but are more skeptical about the timing because drilling in Alaska is restricted to the winter months, and delays of a month or two can set work back by a whole year.
“Alaska as a region is quite prone to delays,” said Wood Mackenzie analyst Rowena Gunn. “It’s very, very high cost, it’s a remote, tough environment to work in, and there’s a lot of environmental regulations.”
Still, the breakeven costs on the project were competitive with other big oil projects, given it is onshore and close to existing infrastructure.
“It’s really big, and it’s oil,” said Calgary-based Gunn, adding there was potential to tie discoveries into existing infrastructure.
Oil Search company spurned an $8 billion approach from Australia’s Woodside Petroleum Ltd. four years ago, but its shares have since fallen due to a glut of LNG and uncertainty in PNG, making it potentially vulnerable.
“In the global sector they’re a small company but have material interests in global scale assets. That will always leave them having corporate appeal,” said Adrian Prendergast, an analyst at stockbroker Morgans, noting the PNG assets.
A banker suggested the Alaskan assets are an unlikely fit and may be sold by any potential suitor, but Botten disagreed.
“It only makes the company much stronger,” he said. “I absolutely don’t see it as a poison pill.”
Oil Search woes in Papua New Guinea throw spotlight on Alaska
Oil Search woes in Papua New Guinea throw spotlight on Alaska
- Race on for Papua New Guinea LNG expansion
Saudi-built AI takes on financial crime
- Mozn’s FOCAL reflects the Kingdom’s growing fintech ambitions
RIYADH: As financial institutions face increasingly complex threats from fraud and money laundering, technology companies are racing to build systems that can keep pace with evolving risks.
One such effort is FOCAL, an AI-powered compliance and fraud prevention platform developed by Riyadh-based enterprise artificial intelligence company Mozn.
Founded in 2017, Mozn was established with a focus on building AI technology tailored to regional market needs and regulatory environments. Over time, the company has expanded its reach beyond Saudi Arabia, developing advanced AI solutions used by financial institutions in multiple markets. It has also gained international recognition, including being listed among the World’s Top 250 Fintech Companies for the second consecutive year.
In January 2026, Mozn’s flagship product, FOCAL, was named a Category Leader in Chartis Research’s RiskTech Quadrant 2025 for both AML Transaction Monitoring and KYC (Know Your Customer) Data and Solutions, placing it among 10 companies globally to receive this designation.
Malik Alyousef, co-founder of Mozn and chief technology officer of FOCAL, told Arab News that the platform initially focused on core anti-money laundering functions when development began in 2018. These included customer screening, watchlists, and transaction monitoring to support counter-terrorism financing efforts and the detection of suspicious activity.
As financial crime tactics evolved, the platform expanded into fraud prevention. According to Alyousef, this shift introduced a more proactive model, beginning with device risk analysis and later incorporating tools such as device fingerprinting, behavioral biometrics, and transaction fraud detection.
More recently, FOCAL has moved toward platform convergence through its Financial Crime Intelligence layer, a vendor-neutral framework designed to bring together multiple systems into a single interface for investigation and reporting. The approach allows institutions to gain a consolidated view without replacing their existing technology infrastructure.
“Our architecture eliminates blind spots in financial crime detection. It gives institutions a complete view of the user journey, combining transactional and non-transactional behavioral data,” Alyousef said.
DID YOU KNOW?
• Some electronic money institutions using the platform have reported fraud reductions of up to 90 percent.
• The platform combines anti-money laundering and fraud prevention into a single financial crime intelligence system.
• FOCAL integrates with existing banking systems without requiring institutions to replace their technology stack.
Beyond its underlying architecture, Alyousef pointed to several areas where FOCAL aims to differentiate itself in a competitive market. One is its emphasis on proactive fraud prevention, which assesses risk throughout the customer lifecycle — from onboarding and login behavior to ongoing account activity — with the goal of stopping fraud before losses occur.
He described the platform as an “expert-led model,” highlighting the availability of on-the-ground support for system design, tuning, assessments, and continuous optimization throughout its use.
“FOCAL is designed to be extended,” Alyousef added, noting its adaptability and the ability for clients to customize schemas, rules, and data fields to match their business models and risk tolerance. This flexibility, he said, allows institutions to respond more quickly to emerging fraud patterns.
Alyousef also emphasized the importance of local context in the platform’s development.
“The platform incorporates regional regulatory requirements and language considerations. Global tools often struggle with local context, naming conventions and compliance nuances — we are designed specifically with these realities in mind,” he said.
FOCAL is currently used by a range of organizations, including traditional banks, digital banks, fintech firms, electronic money institutions, payment companies, and other financial service providers. Alyousef said results from live deployments have been significant, with some large EMI clients reporting fraud reductions of up to 90 percent.
“Clients benefit not only from reduced fraud losses but also from an improved customer experience, as the system minimizes unnecessary friction and false rejections,” he said. “Beyond financial services, we also work with organizations in e-commerce and telecommunications.”
Looking ahead, Alyousef said the company sees agentic AI as a key direction for the future of financial crime prevention, both in the region and globally. Mozn, he added, is investing heavily in this area to enhance investigative workflows and operational efficiency, building on the capabilities of its Financial Crime Intelligence layer.
“We are pioneers in introducing agentic AI for financial crime investigation and rule-building. Our roadmap increasingly emphasizes automation, advanced machine learning and AI-assisted workflows to improve investigator productivity and reduce false positives.”
As AI tools become more widely available, Alyousef warned that the risk of misuse by criminals is also increasing, raising the bar for defensive technologies.
“Our goal is to stay ahead of that curve and to contribute meaningfully to positioning Saudi Arabia and the region as globally competitive leaders in AI,” he said.
