According to investment research firm Hawilti, at least 26 drilling campaigns and rigs are scheduled to be active in Africa this year. Grace Goodrich, a Publications Editor at Energy Capital & Power, noted several markets which will be more active than others and lead the uptick in African upstream activity. In her opinion, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, Chad, and Nigeria are ‘the place to be’ if you are in the African oil and gas sector…
Zimbabwe’s Cabora Bassa Basin is home to a working conventional hydrocarbon system and Invictus Energy has already identified five prospects in the area that could hold up to 1.2 billion barrels of oil…
Currently producing around 93,000 barrels per day, Chad holds sizable untapped hydrocarbon potential, with approximately 1.5 billion barrels of proven reserves and vast areas located within the oil-rich Central Africa Rift System.
As Africa’s second-largest oil producer, Nigeria is maintaining its upstream momentum primarily through shallow-water exploration, including General Hydrocarbons’ drilling campaign on OML 120 and Chevron’s two-year campaign offshore Escravos starting mid-2023. French major TotalEnergies will also be conducting deep-water drilling through its planned infill drilling campaign on OML 130.
“Climate campaigners have pitched themselves against African governments that believe they should be allowed to use gas - which emits less climate-heating carbon dioxide than coal and oil when burned - to develop their economies and provide power to 600 million Africans who still lack access to electricity.”
Oil exploration boom in Namibia https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-exploration-boom-namibia-2024-06-21/ Namibia has become an oil exploration hotspot after several discoveries in recent years along its coast. It has not yet produced any oil or gas, but oil majors such as TotalEnergies and Shell have made discoveries estimated at 2.6 billion barrels, with production in the southern African country expected from about 2030.
There have been discoveries in the Orange Basin and there are other prospective areas, including Luderitz, Kavango and Walvis basins…
Namibia is planning for first oil production from Venus, estimated to hold about 5.1 billion barrels of oil, between 2029 and 2030.
In a related note, Uruguay has also become active. Related because back in the Pangea days, before the continents broke apart, Namibia and Uruguay were neighbors.
With its offshore acreage receiving exploratory attention for the first time, Uruguay’s emergence has been swift, with Eytan Uliel, CEO of Challenger Energy, noting that within 18 months, the country has secured licenses from major global energy players. This shift follows the discovery by TotalEnergies and Shell of significant oil reserves off Namibia’s coast in 2022, which sparked hopes for Uruguay, given the geological similarities between the two regions. Santiago Ferro of Ancap suggests that this development has doubled the probability of finding oil and/or gas off Uruguay’s coast to 5-25%.
The Namibian discoveries triggered a surge of interest among energy firms eyeing Uruguay, effectively reducing the country’s exploration risks. Among other companies, Challenger Energy holds exploration permits for Uruguayan blocks, with major players like Apache, YPF, and Shell re-entering the market.
Humanity, or at least the politically powerful within humanity have made the choice to have methane and CO2 powered GCC accelerate for at least another decade. The attempt to prevent that died waaaay back when W Bush beat Gore, and since then we have seen playacting on both sides…
Before that in the '90s the Kyoto Protocol went nowhere, and I don’t think China was ever going to not accelerate until it got rich.
Uruguay is an interesting case because it has a high percentage of renewables for electricity generation, but it knows there is global demand for petroleum.