Activity and opportunities abound across the Africa region
E&P across Africa in 2024 is off to a busy start, with clear signs the exploration industry is recovering from half a decade of under-investment. Exploration activity is still focused…
Africa
Getting close to Mopane
For obvious reasons, there has been a lot of media coverage today on the test results of the Mopane-1X well in Namibian waters. The well flowed at 14 kboepd at…
A working petroleum system on purely oceanic crust
*Christian Niño currently works at Petronas and Martin Zubiri works at Pan American Energy. For a long time, exploring for hydrocarbons in the deep waters of the Gulf of Guinea,…
Why the conjugate margin in Uruguay and Southern Brazil may have even more to offer than the Orange Basin in Namibia
Gondwanan break-up-basins and their multiple source rocks The advantage of Namibia’s conjugate margin in Uruguay and Southern Brazil is likely to be the sand and clay deposited by the Rio…
Monitoring a geothermal motor
Following the drilling of successful exploration wells into the Kenyan Rift Valley in the 1970’s, the flagship Olkaria geothermal field has seen a steady development to a capacity of around…
New light oil discovery draws attention away from the Orange Basin central axis to northern promise
Reports continue to come in from the Namibia Orange Basin drilling campaigns of Shell, TotalEnergies and Galp, lighting up this enormous Cretaceous delta basin for future production potential. Shell are…
What could be behind the downgrade of Shell’s deep-water discoveries in Namibia?
This week, Namibia’s petroleum commissioner Maggy Shino announced that Shell has thus far discovered 200 million barrels of recoverable oil at Graff and 300 million barrels of recoverable oil at…
A deeper oil-bearing reservoir in the Gulf of Suez
In August, Cheiron announced the discovery of a 165 feet oil column in pre-Miocene Nubia Formation sandstones in exploration well GNN-11. The well was drilled into a fault block to…
From near misses to commercial success
The Horn of Africa, comprising Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia holds many ancient geological trends including the failed Karoo and Jurassic and Cretaceous rifts that record the fragmentation of Gondwana…
Somalia: The final frontier?
At the outset of a project in the area, one has to ask “Why does offshore Somalia remain unexplored?” It is one of the last undrilled frontier basins in the…
The source rock for Venus
Duncan Macgregor and his colleague Colin Reeves are working on a project that will result in the creation of a series of paleotectonic and paleogeographic maps of the African continent.…
Exploring the many facets of Africa’s geology on the back of world events
“You are not going to play around here for a month and do nothing”, said Keryn’s father when she returned home to Oranjemund (Namibia) from High School for the summer…