The Gambia’s offshore acreage is hot again
The West-African margin is back in the exploration spotlight, not only because of yesterday’s announcement by Shell to drill more wells on their PEL-39 licence in Namibia – but also…
Africa
New modelling study reveals a petroleum system overlying oceanic crust offshore Equatorial Guinea
The deepwater Douala-Rio Muni Basin (DRMB) is a non-volcanic, Mesozoic-Cenozoic rifted passive margin located offshore in Equatorial Guinea (EG), West Africa. Commercial oil and gas fields have been discovered on…
Unlocking Egypt’s Western Desert: The next Eagle Ford?
When people think of unconventional oil, their minds probably go straight to North America, where long horizontals and multilaterals drilled in heavily faulted plays have unlocked massive gas, liquids, and…
Imaging prospective sedimentary strata offshore Equatorial Guinea
In recent years, exploration has increasingly shifted toward Cretaceous deep-water sandstones across the broader Atlantic Basin, resulting in a series of major discoveries over the past 15 years. Considerable potential…
The search for barrels in Bissau – exploration renascimento in the southern MSGBC
Investor confidence is returning to the West Africa oil frontier, with major oil companies taking large basin-scale positions in Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The map of West Africa offshore…
Libya – exploration stories
In his book “The prize”, Daniel Yergin describes how Libya’s entry on the global oil stage in the 1950s was spectacular and engineered wisely. Yergin quotes the Libyan petroleum minister:…
Equatorial Guinea: Time to shine…again!
Blue skies over Malabo Time for Equatorial Guinea’s next day in the sun Figure 1: License blocks in EG. Equatorial Guinea, “EG”, is a unique land in a myriad of…
The New Gas Consortium: Angola’s first non-associated gas project
How broadband pre-stack depth reprocessing, with a post-stack survey merge for the migrated OBC and streamer volumes, has enabled the development of 50-year-old gas fields Multiclient reprocessing of recovered legacy…
Mozambique: Revealing exploration potential of deepwater Zambezi Delta
Mozambique’s deepwater Zambezi Basin: Where AVO meets untapped opportunity Integrating AVO analysis into frontier workflows to identify exploration opportunities Assessing frontier basin prospectivity with limited subsurface data presents significant challenges…
Kharas-1 well might have two surprises in store
As the exploration community read the news around Rhino Resources’ Volans-1X “high liquid-yield gas condensate” discovery this week – is it good news to have proven yet another fluid type?…
Revisiting the southern boundary of Sangomar
Recently published maps of the Sangomar field offshore Senegal depict the southern boundary of the accumulation exactly lining up with the maritime boundary between Senegal and The Gambia, suggesting that…
West African deepwater plays Tracking the Cretaceous mega-clastic systems
Unlocking deepwater potential Exploration in the Mauritanian coastal basin has historically focused on the Cenozoic salt-draped channel plays, as proven by the discovery of the Chinguetti Field in 2001. Since…