UK player gears up for next stage of exploration offshore Namibia

The UK-based oil and gas company Tower Resources has been invited to apply for an extension of the initial exploration period for its license off the coast of Namibia.

The Namibian Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) has informed Tower Resources that it plans to extend the initial exploration period of the PEL 96 license to October 31, 2024, inviting it to apply for an extension lasting two to three years. The UK firm has an 80% operated interest in the license comprising blocks 1910A, 1911, and 1912B, covering 23,297 km² of the northern Walvis Basin and Dolphin Graben offshore Namibia.

The MME will also defer the company’s commitment to acquire 1,000 km² of new 3D seismic data to the first renewal period. As explained by the UK firm, the remaining work commitment for the initial exploration period, comprising the oil seep satellite analysis, play fairway analysis, development of an updated prospect and lead inventory, and the high-grading of acreage, is “substantially” complete.

Tower Resources Chairman and CEO, Jeremy Asher, said: “Our view of the prospectivity of PEL 96 has improved greatly since we began the current phase of work in 2019, and we look forward to having sufficient data quality to share a more detailed picture of the structures we wish to explore further with the 3D data acquisition, as soon as we have it. In the meantime, we plan to prepare a more detailed report summarising our findings to date, the main conclusions of which we will share with investors in due course.”

The work on evaluating stratigraphic and structural leads and prospects is ongoing, with plans to reprocess the previously acquired 2D seismic data over large areas of the license in the remainder of the initial exploration period and the first renewal period. The idea is to select the optimal area for further 3D data acquisition.

Apart from the large anticlines and other structural traps that had already been identified, the firm thinks the newly discovered stratigraphic traps are also encouraging. The basin and thermal maturity study completed in 2023 identified source rocks deep within the PEL96 portion of the Dolphin Graben. According to calculations, these were mature for over 100 to 150 billion barrels of oil generation, and well-defined migration paths for this oil have also been found.

Since then, the company has reviewed and interpreted over 20,000 line kilometers of 2D seismic data across the license, which resulted in identifying a “substantial” number of very large stratigraphic traps in five main areas of the license, located next to the previously identified deeper source rocks of the Dolphin Graben and migration paths.

While the results have shed new light on the prospectivity of the acreage, Tower Resources believes that new 3D seismic data on all of them cannot be acquired in the next phase of work. This is why the PEL 96 joint venture (JV) intends to reprocess the existing seismic data to extract as much information as possible from the original data files and improve their quality, enabling it to make a final decision on the optimal 3D data acquisition area.