Page 13 - AfrOil Week 19 2021

AfrOil PROJECTS & COMPANIES AfrOil

The department issued a licence-to-establish majeure on its contract with Exmar, the Belgian
(LTE) for the project to UTM in March of this company that owns Tango LNG, in 2020, citing
year. That licence envisions the installation fallout from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pan-
of an FLNG unit capable of processing up to demic. The vessel has been berthed in the Uru-
176mn cubic feet (4.984mn cubic metres) per guayan port of Nueva Palmira ever since.
day of associated gas from the Yoho field. The UTM will be installing the FLNG vessel for
vessel will turn out 1.2mn tonnes per year (tpy) ExxonMobil (US) and state-owned Nigerian
of LNG, equivalent to one or two standard-size National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC), the two
LNG cargoes each month. shareholders in the Yoho oilfield.
The Nigerian company has not yet decided The latter two companies began developing
whether to charter an existing FLNG units or Yoho in 2003 and have been re-injecting associ-
order a newbuild unit for the project. Most of ated gas back into the reservoir in order to max-
the existing vessels have already been assigned imise yields. Now, though, the site is mature and
to, or were purpose-built for other projects: the they are now looking to switch course. They see
PFLNG-1 and-2 vessels, for example, were built the FLNG project as a means of commercialis-
for Malaysia’s Kanowit project and are slated to ing the field’s gas while oil extraction is winding
remain there. down.
The only existing FLNG unit known to be In the meantime, Yoho is still yielding about
available is a smaller vessel – the 500,000 tpy 35,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil. ExxonMo-
Tango LNG, which Argentina’s national oil com- bil and NNPC are using a floating production,
pany (NOC) YPF chartered in 2019 for instal- storage and off-loading (FPSO) to develop the
lation near Buenos Aires. YPF declared force offshore site. ™

ReconAfrica begins drilling second

exploration well in Kavango basin

NAMIBIA CANADA’S Reconnaissance Energy Africa source rock and reservoir.
(ReconAfrica) said last week that it had spudded The three-well drilling programme is being
its second exploration well in the Kavango basin carried out within a licence area known as PEL
in north-eastern Namibia. 73. ReconAfrica owns a 90% stake in the explo-
In a statement, ReconAfrica reported that ration licence for this block, which covers an
it was using one of its own rigs, the 1,000-HP area of more than 25,341 square km. If it discov-
Jarvie-1, to sink the 6-1 shaft. It said it intended ers commercially viable reserves, it will have the
to sink this new well, the second in a three-well right to negotiate a 25-year production licence
drilling programme, to a target depth of 3,800 for PEL 73.
metres. Like 6-2, the first well sunk within the The company also has a 100% stake in
company’s licence area at a site 16 km to the an adjacent licence area – PEL 001/2020, a
south, 6-1 lies within “one of five major sub-ba- 9,921-square km block on the other side of the
sins of the larger, more laterally extensive, Per- Namibia-Botswana border. Like PEL 73, this
mian-aged deep Kavango basin,” it noted. block lies within the Kavango basin, which con-
ReconAfrica did not say when it expected tains both conventional and unconventional
to finish the well. However, it did state that hydrocarbon plays. ™
Schlumberger, the international oilfield services
provider, would be applying the same compre-
hensive logging programme used at the first
well, 6-2, to the second well. It also said it would
run a vertical seismic profile (VSP) with the aim
of enabling a more accurate tie-in of well data to
the results of a 2-D seismic survey that is due to
begin in June of this year.
The Canadian company will use the results
from 6-1 to evaluate the working conventional
petroleum system discovered in the first well “in
an area of maximum thickness”, the statement
said. According to previous reports, ReconAfri-
ca’s first well encountered more than 200 metres
of crude oil and natural gas shows over three
separate intervals within a stacked sequence of PEL 73 is adjacent to PEL 001/2020 in Botswana (Image: ReconAfrica)

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