More oil to flow offshore Gabon as Borr Drilling’s rig gears up for workover ops before spudding another prospect in 2025

Oslo-listed oil and gas E&P player BW Energy has brought online another well on its list at an oil field in the Dussafu license off the coast of Gabon, Africa. The firm will now move to workover operations at three offline wells with a jack-up rig owned by Borr Drilling, an offshore drilling contractor. Afterward, one more prospect is on the drilling agenda to find more hydrocarbons before the rig’s current contract runs out.

BW Energy has a 73.5% operated stake in the Dussafu permit and Panoro Energy holds the remaining 17.5% participating interest. After an oil discovery was made on the northern flank of the Hibiscus field in May 2024, the operator proceeded to conclude the drilling and the logging of the DHIBM-7P pilot well around 1.5 kilometers north-northwest of the MaBoMo production platform, disclosing a substantial oil discovery with good reservoir quality and a material uplift to the Hibiscus area.

As a result, the company began drilling the DHIBM-7H production well with Borr Drilling’s Norve jack-up rig, targeting the recently discovered Hibiscus Northern Flank. Following the completion of drilling activities, the well was put onstream with a conventional electrical submersible pump (ESP) system in early October 2024 at a rate consistent with previous wells on the block and in line with expectations, based on Panoro’s information.

According to the firm, the completion of the DHIBM-7H well concludes the current production drilling campaign at Dussafu, which has delivered eight new production wells across the Hibiscus/Ruche development project, located about 20 kilometers northwest of the Tortue field, yielding two discoveries and adding an estimated 23.1 million barrels of gross 2P reserves.

Therefore, the Norve jack-up drilling rig is expected to undertake a workover/ESP replacement program on certain existing wells for which delivery of all necessary conventional ESP systems and spares is said to have been secured. Once this has been completed, all wells will have conventional ESP systems installed, resulting in gross production reaching the targeted 40,000 bopd level by year-end. 

With this out of the way, the only thing left on the rig’s list will be the Bourdon prospect test well (DBM-1), slated to be the last rig operation under the current contract in early 2025. This prospect has an estimated mid-case potential of 83 million barrels in place and 29 million barrels recoverable in the Gamba and Dentale formations.

John Hamilton, CEO of Panoro, commented: “We are pleased to have safely and successfully delivered the current production drilling campaign at Dussafu, which was expanded to eight wells in order to accommodate fast-track development of the two new discoveries which were announced during May 2024. With five out of the eight wells presently onstream, in addition to the six pre-existing wells at the Tortue field, we are moving to within touching distance of the targeted gross rate of 40,000 bopd from the block. 

“Our current focus is on fully transitioning all the new wells to conventional ESP systems and restoring production at the three shut-in wells, after which we will drill the exciting Bourdon prospect in line with our infrastructure lead exploration and appraisal strategy aimed at unlocking the substantial organic upside that exists on the block.”

Panoro Energy confirmed the gross oil production at Dussafu averaged approximately 27,465 bopd in Q3 2024, which is seen as the highest quarterly rate achieved since the start-up of production on the block in 2018. This was corroborated by BW Energy, which revealed a change-out of the DHBSM-1H ESP that failed in September, as the last of the defective generation, enabling a production restart in mid-October 2024.

The oil produced at the Hibiscus/Ruche project is transported by pipeline to the FPSO BW Adolo for processing and storage before being offloaded to export tankers.