The Canadian full-cycle upstream oil and gas company is maintaining its primary focus
this year on its Nigerian and Namibian Orange Basin assets
Africa Oil Corp is a top-tier performer with high-quality producing assets and a strong
balance sheet. Equally important, the Canadian oil and gas company is a promising way
to play the oil patch as there’s significant upside for investors at the Venus light oil
discovery in the Orange Basin, off the coast of Namibia.
Venus was discovered a year ago by TotalEnergies using the drillship Maersk Voyager in
Block 2913B, hitting 84 meters of net pay in a high-quality Lower Cretaceous sandstone
reservoir that contained light oil and associated gas.
Analysts at Wood Mackenzie have described Venus as the “world's largest oil discovery
in 2022.” Reports have theorised that the Orange Basin find could hold recoverable
reserves of 10-to-15 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas.
Africa Oil has an indirect interest in the block through a 30.9% shareholding in its
investee company Impact Oil & Gas Limited. Impact holds a 20% working interest in
Block 2913B and an 18.89% working interest in the adjacent Block 2912. Paris-based oil
and gas major TotalEnergies is the operator of both blocks.
TotalEnergies has now spudded a key appraisal probe offshore Namibia that will go a
long way to revealing the actual scale of the potentially colossal Venus oil and gas
discovery.
“The Venus oil discovery, offshore Namibia, has opened up a world-class petroleum
basin,” Africa Oil CEO Keith Hill told Proactive.
“TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné has described it as one of the biggest discoveries
in the world with the potential to be one of the biggest ones offshore ever. If you look at
TotalEnergies, they're spending half their worldwide exploration budget on appraising
the discovery this year. That tells you how important they think it is,” he added.
Hill has worked in the oil industry for 38 years with oil majors such as Occidental
Petroleum and Shell Oil Company and has spent the last 25 years with the highly
successful Lundin Group.
TotalEnergies' Pouyanné has referred to Block 2913B as TotalEnergies’ Golden Block
and compared it to Block 17, off the Angolan coast which has produced three billion
barrels of oil since 2001.
TotalEnergies has launched a four-well programme in Namibia, including the re-entry
of the Venus-1X discovery well, in Block 2913B, to appraise the Venus discovery and to
investigate a potential westerly extension of Venus, the Nara prospect, formerly referred
to as West Venus on Block 2912.