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Chevron and partners are evaluating a commercial sized accumulation of natural gas, encountered in the Narges 1 well, in the Mediterranean Sea offshore Egypt.

Tarek El Molla, the Egyptian Minister of Hydrocarbons, confirmed the discovery to the country’s parliament on Friday, December 16, 2022, but he did not give details of the estimated volume of the accumulation.

The Narges block in the Eastern Mediterranean is one of the assets that Chevron took over in the event of its recent acquisition of Noble Energy, the American independent.

The Middle East Economic Survey (MEES) reported in early December 2022, that the field could hold an estimated 3.5Trillion Standard cubic feet of gas. It also reported that the gas was encountered gas at the prognosed primary target depth of 3980 metres.

The estimated 3.5Tcf volume is about 15% of the ultimate recoverable reserves in the giant Zohr gas field, discovered by ENI in the same Mediterranean in 2015, and the discovery is timely. Africa’s third largest economy has been determined to maximize its exports of natural gas to improve its Foreign Exchange earnings. With gas production averaging 6.5Billion standard cubic feet per day in third quarter 2022, a year-on-year drop of 700Million standard cubic feet per day, the country commenced, last August, a rationing of gas for domestic power production, in order to free up more gas for export.

The Narges block is 45% operated by Chevron with another 45% owned by ENI, the Italian explorer.   Tharwa Petroleum, an Egyptian state hydrocarbon company, holds the remaining 10%.

The Narges-1 probe is being drilled by the drillship Stena Forth, in an acreage which lies some 60 kilometres from the Sinai peninsula, about 80 kilometres east of the nearest Egyptian gas infrastructure and 70 kilometres west of the long dormant Gaza Marine gas discovery offshore Gaza Strip, a Palestinian enclave.

Italian major ENI and Algeria’s state hydrocarbon company SONATRACH say they have tested 1,300Barrels of Oil Per Day(BOPD) bbl/day of oil and about 2Million standard cubic feet of associated gas per day in the Rhourde Oulad Djemaa Ouest-1 (RODW-1) exploration well in the Zemlet el Arbi concession, located in the Berkine North Basin in the Algerian desert.

The hydrocarbons were encountered in the Triassic sandstones of the Tagi reservoir.

RODW-1 is the third well in the exploration drilling campaign, but the second discovery, coming, as it is  after what ENI calls “the significant discovery of HDLE-1, announced in March 2022”, and the successful second appraisal well HDLS-1 in the adjacent Sif Fatima II.

“The development of these discoveries will be fast-tracked, thanks to their proximity to existing BRN/ROD facilities”, ENI says in a release.

“The RODW-1 discovery confirms the validity of ENI’s and SONATRACH’s successful near-field and infrastructure-led exploration strategy, that allows a rapid valorisation of the new resources”, the company explains.

The Zemlet el Arbi concession is operated by a joint venture between ENI (49%), and SONATRACH (51%). The discovery is part of the new exploration campaign which will include the drilling of five wells in the Berkine North Basin.

ION Geophysical Corporation (has completed the reprocessing and reimaging of approximately 19,100 km² of 3D seismic data offshore West Africa for its Mauritania 3D reprocessing programme.

The multi-client project was undertaken through an exclusive agreement with the Ministry of Petroleum, Energy and Mines in Mauritania. It is comprised of 11 vintage seismic surveys and provides a seamless, modern, high resolution data set spanning the Mauritanian offshore coastal basin. This basin is a key part of the frontier MSGBC basin in which several large-scale, offshore, gas fields have been discovered, with an estimated 63trillion cubic feet (Tcf)* in place in Mauritania thus far, ION declares.

“With foreign investment flowing in, field developments expected to come online in 2023, gas favoured as a source of energy for the energy transition, and capacity expected to exceed domestic needs, contracts for LNG export to European and other markets is anticipated”, the company reiterates.

“The MSGBC basin has become one that matters in the global oil and gas landscape, even if it is still today a frontier area. We have an enormous potential and we must find the right solutions to use these resources for the development of the country,” stated Chemsdine Sow Deina, Exploration Director at Societe Mauritanienne des Hydrocarbures (SMH).

“With ION’s delivery of its Mauritania 3D reprocessing program, operators now have a lower cost, lower risk, sustainable solution for evaluating the offshore hydrocarbon potential of Mauritania,” said Chris Usher, President and CEO. “As a result, we anticipate additional discoveries will be made that ensure Mauritania’s long term energy security, as well as exports that fund sustainable economic growth and development.”

The Mauritania 3D reprocessing program was supported by the industry and almost triples the amount of 3D data that ION has delivered this year from approximately 10,000 km² to 29,000 km². Final pre-stack depth imaged deliverables are now available. Learn more at iongeo.com/Mauritania.

*Estimate from Mauritania-Senegal: an emerging New African Gas Province – is it still possible? October, 1, 2020. The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies

Shell has not expressly announced commercial discovery, whether minimal or significant, in its deepwater drilling offshore Namibia.

But everyone has had a say or two about the Graf-1 probe, located in Petroleum Exploration License 39 (PEL 39) in the Orange basin. Upstream, the Norway based oil and gas focused newspaper, had reported a very speculative story of the supposed find.

The well is being drilled by the drillship Valaris DS-10 in 2,000 metres of water.

The global newswire, Reuters, citing “three industry sources”, followed up, insisting the European major had made “a significant oil and gas discovery which could spark a wave of investment in the southern African country”. And then, after using the term “significant”, Reuters goes to state “it is unclear if the discoveries are big enough for Shell to go ahead with the development of the country’s first deep water field”. Reuters’ claim that the Namibian government was planning to make an announcement on the details of the discovery in the week of January 31, 2022, also turned out to be exaggerated.

A noteworthy feature of the speculation is the strong sense of Namibian government push behind it. “Upstream understands from two other sources that senior officials in Namibia’s Ministry of Mines & Energy believe results from the well are “positive” and that “Shell will do well” in the country”, the paper said, adding: “|Last month, just days after information began leaking out about Graff-1’s success, a further source with Namibian connections said Tom Alweendo, Namibia’s Energy Minister, was ‘very excited’ by the results”.

The media has gone so far as to report the density of the fluid (light oil), age of the reservoir (Upper Cretaceous sands, thought to be Cenomanian) and size of the find (a potential 300Million-barrel) It even reports hydrocarbon footage: “one layer at least 60 metres deep of hydrocarbons”.

All of these reports cite Shell executives as unwilling to comment, only grudgingly noting: “We continue to safely execute Graff-1 operations.”

The Norwegian geophysical company, TGS, has announced commencement of a new seismic survey in the MSGBC Basin, offshore Mauritania.

It is a follow up to the North-West Africa Atlantic Margin (NWAAM) two dimensional (2D) seismic acquisition campaign.

The current survey, NWAAM 2021, will comprise 7,500 kilometres of seismic data, with a modern broadband acquisition set-up. The project is being undertaken using the vessel BGP Pioneer

“The survey is designed to illuminate the regional plays in the ultra-deep and deepwater areas with a new azimuth and to provide prospectivity insights of an oil-prone area in relation to recent key wells and the shallow water geology”, TGS says in a release.

TGS has been, perhaps the busiest multi-client seismic survey contractor on the African continent in the last three years. It was the go -to company for the Liberian licensing round, which was launched in 2^nd Quarter 2020, because it holds a range of multi-client data across the Harper Basin, the focus of the round, to support the activity.

TGS acquired a keen rival, Spectrum Geophysical, in June 2019 and in 2020 acquired the Senegal North Ultra-Deep offshore three-dimensional (3D) survey, covering an area of more than 5,100km². The stand-alone northern Senegal survey was the continuation of the Jaan 3D seismic survey, which is TGS’ 3D dataset covering the southern portion of the Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Guinea Conakry (MSGBC) Basin, offshore north-west Africa.

In Nigeria, between 2019 and 2021, TGS, along with its joint venture partner PetroData, carried out the country’s first regional multi-client Multibeam and Seafloor Sampling (MB&SS) Study, covering an area of approximately 80,000 square kilometres of the offshore Niger Delta and incorporating around 150 cores from the seabed, whose location is based on multibeam backscatter anomalies.

In terms of the ongoing Mauritanian survey, TGS says the project has a 60-day acquisition timeline, with fast-track data available three months after acquisition. The full dataset will be available by Q2 2022.

“Our latest seismic survey offshore Mauritania will provide explorers with the subsurface intelligence needed to assess the hydrocarbon potential of the deep and ultra-deepwater”, TGS says. “We see this project as the natural continuation of our successful NWAAM campaign, one of our flagship projects in Africa”.