Norway was followed by Sweden, Namibia, the UK, Finland, the US, Chile, Canada, Botswana and Greenland, with Australia slipping from sixth to 12th.

While resources companies see Australia being kicked out of the top 10 as a stern reminder of how far its federal, state and territory governments need to go despite the carbon tax axing, its decline was more due to the Europeans' dramatic response to the EU's mandate to solve its raw materials crisis.

The European Union calling for new rules and agreements on sustainable international management and access to raw materials came around the time Norway was facing declining oil production. These two triggers prompted the country to, firstly, figure out its minerals resource base, then thought up incentives for mining exploration.

Though Norway has since made many more oil discoveries to boost its production, the mining reforms probably led to it winning this year's survey. However, its tax system remains an oddity.

London-based Charles Stanley Securities equity researcher Brendan Long told RESOURCESTOCKS that the Norwegian part of the North Sea was underexplored and the principal attraction for juniors was the tax rate of 78% of monies lost or spent in oil and gas exploration.

"That's unique in the world as far as I know," he said. "It is a relatively immature basin, so the juniors have a successful track record of discovering oil and gas, much higher than in west and east Africa and the UK. It's a good place to be exploring for a junior explorer."

Though Norway's entirely offshore oil industry is expensive, as always, Long said companies could enter it with a small working interest position.

"So you don't have to be 75% interest holder and operator, you can have 5% on a world-class exploration play. So your costs and risks can be managed downwards," he said.

"If you do it right you could be free-carried, yet that's not necessarily what I see.

"If you look at Faroe Petroleum, it's alongside some of the majors and they're stumping up cash and farming into other people's licenses - it's not what you'd expect to see.

"It's not the traditional model for junior companies, which usually comes in early, develops it from the ground up then farms out and gets full carry. I'm not seeing as much of that. I see a lot of juniors along for the ride with the major international companies, paying their way.

"I think it's because the juniors aren't doing their job right and not being as clever as they should. They should be building the assets from the ground up but they're not."

Long believes the reason for this may be that there's the opportunity to take a minority interest in the Norwegian plays and there's also pressure on all companies, including juniors, to successfully explore for oil. So if they can enter these plays with a small working interest and get some success, it is better for their market cap, so shareholders are happy.

This, however, is opposed to the traditional model where the juniors are the smartest, building up ideas from scratch and taking them to the major oil companies for funding.

While the UK side of the North Sea is suffering from the natural decline of resources and the scale of discoveries going down considerably, in Norway the principal problem is that the tax rate is considerably high at 78%.

"So everything goes in reverse - when you discover something and you have some success and profits, your shareholders are only getting 22%," Long said.

"It's also the scale factor - if you're drilling some of these deep water wells, it's high risk and costly."

Therefore, it's "a very attractive place to lose money", he added.

The size of the prize is still significant. The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate said that as of the end of last year there was believed to be 14.2 billion standard cubic feet of oil equivalent - an 8Bcf increase on 2012. It said undiscovered resources constituted 21% of this.

Last year saw 78 fields in production on the Norwegian shelf, 13 fields being developed, 88 discoveries being evaluated and about 165 projects for improved recovery on fields in production, with further plans for development and operation across the North Sea, Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea.

The slide of last year's winner the US to fourth spot was blamed on the Obama administration's war on coal, despite the investment landscape there better than it has been for years.

Former Patersons energy analyst Alexis Clark, CEO of American Patriot, which listed on the ASX in July with assets in the Rocky Mountain basins onshore US, said infrastructure was the big advantage in the US, with 70% of the world's onshore rig supplies there, including those used in horizontal drilling, which are needed for shale exploitation.

The company's relatively early entry into onshore US tight oil provides a cheap entry point into old carbonate fields.

Control Risks managing director (Australia Pacific) Jason Rance said the US was "as far as possible from presidential election uncertainty, the economy is growing robustly, key macro risks have receded, the political will for major new regulation is non-existent, and policymakers remain favourably disposed to extractives, with a weather eye on large-scale exports in the near future - Ukraine adding a bit of political will".

"The only clear reason why the US might have slipped is that the Obama administration in 2014 embarked on a unilateral campaign to implement climate change policy through executive action.

"The primary target is coal-fired power plants - which has dented sentiment for both power producers and coal miners - but the regulatory push has also hit more broadly, with moves to mandate disclosure of fraccing fluid composition.

"State level regulation of fraccing is much more important, and a mixed bag: some states are full steam ahead, others are placing constraints. On aggregate, the overall environment remains very favourable to the unconventional oil and gas industry.

While there have been no major step changes this year in the business or regulatory environments of Canada, which dropped from second spot to eighth, Rance noted that First Nations had successfully mobilised political will against energy projects, both fraccing in places like New Brunswick and oil sands pipelines in British Columbia.

Such projects, once deemed inevitable, are now anything but, as popular opposition and rising costs eat into the value proposition.