It don’t rain but it pour. Or, in the case of oil, it don’t trickle but it gush. The world has recently been awash with tales of oil bonanzas in far-flung corners of the globe. A cold shower is now in order.

Two weeks ago BP announced a “giant” find in the Gulf of Mexico. BG Group has celebrated two finds in the pre-salt area off Brazil in the past 10 days alone. On Wednesday, Anadarko announced positive results from the Venus well off the coast of Sierra Leone. The significance here is not so much what Venus may produce, but what it says about the prospectivity of the wider region. Executives enthuse that the chances of success in an arc stretching from Sierra Leone to Ghana’s deepwater Jubilee field have increased, at a stroke, from 5 to 25 per cent.