Barely a month after drilling a duster in shallow offshore Côte d’Ivoire, Murphy Oil’s geoscientists are poring through seismic data covering vast acreages, for clues to hydrocarbon accumulations located several hundred kilometres north of that west African country.
The American minnow signed into a new block with Moroccan state firm ONHYM, granting it 10 exploration permits for the 16,989km2 acreage, which combines the ‘Gharb Offshore’ and ‘Rabat Deep’ blocks in Morocco’s offshore ‘Atlantic margin’.
Morocco hopes the deal with Murphy Oil, which has been assigned a 75% operator’s stake, will tap the country’s ‘underexplored’ Atlantic margin, but Murphy is cautious about picking a drill site, preferring months of extensive reinterpretation of existing seismic.
Murphy’s Caracal-1X exploration well in Block CI-102 offshore Côte d’Ivoire encountered non-commercial hydrocarbon shows and was plugged and abandoned as a dry hole, after reaching a total depth of 8,534 feet (2,601 metres).
Murphy, together with its partner Société Nationale d’Opérations Pétrolières de la Côte d’Ivoire (PETROCI), remains committed to moving forward with the Bubale-1X well in Block CI-709. This well targets a geological play independent from Civette-1X and Caracal-1X, the initial two wells in the three-well exploration campaign in Côte d’Ivoire. Murphy holds a 90 percent working interest in Block CI-102 and serves as operator. PETROCI holds the remaining 10 percent.
Spanish operator, Repsol relinquished the Gharb Offshore permit five years ago due to disappointing exploration results. Murphy is hoping that, with its understanding of the transform margin in West Africa, it could come up with a different result from what Repsol had in the North westernmost part of the continent..
