Success Probability: 1 in 460,000. The Great Whale Fraud

The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) announced that the Yoon Suk-yeol administration's 'Great Whale Project' is based on an extremely optimistic outlook of 1 in 460,000—a figure representing the maximum possible value despite the high uncertainty, as no drilling has even taken place yet.
This was entirely the arbitrary decision of Yoon Suk-yeol, ignoring the opinions of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) and experts, and officials in the Yoon administration failed to prevent this individual's unilateralism.
Ultimately, a hollow, rosy future was presented to the public.
It was on June 2, 2024, the day before the national briefing, that then-Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Ahn Duk-geun reported,
"There is a possibility of oil and gas reserves ranging from a minimum of 3.5 billion barrels to a maximum of 14 billion barrels, but exploratory drilling costing 576.1 billion KRW is required to confirm actual presence."
After receiving this report, Yoon Suk-yeol stated during the national briefing the following day,
"Results have come out showing a very high possibility that up to 14 billion barrels of oil and gas are deposited, and this has been verified by leading research institutions and experts,"
and "This can be considered a larger amount of explored resources than the 11 billion barrels of the Guyana block in South America, which is evaluated as the largest oil development project of this century in deep-sea blocks."
According to the BAI, the MOTIE had originally suggested alternatives to the Presidential Office to express "prospectivity" instead of disclosing specific resource volumes, but this was ignored.
Furthermore, regarding the figure of 'up to 14 billion barrels,' the BAI pointed out that no drilling has been conducted and commercial economic viability is not guaranteed, making it merely 'explored resources.'
In contrast, the '11 billion barrels' of the Guyana block that Yoon compared it to refers to 'reserves' and 'contingent resources' that were discovered through drilling and are commercially recoverable, making the comparison with explored resources inappropriate.
The BAI also revealed that even this unexplored resource volume is a value predicated on the assumption that
"all seven prospective structures succeed in exploration, resulting in the maximum explored resource volume."
In other words, the maximum explored resource volume of 14 billion barrels can only be secured if all seven prospective structures—each having different geological success probabilities ranging from 7.1% to 21.2%—succeed in exploration.
The probability of all seven prospective structures succeeding is only 0.000218%, or 1 in 460,000.
Yoon Suk-yeol's Great Whale Project, which preached nothing but a hollow, rosy future—if this isn't a 'fraud against the nation,' then what is?