Page 6 - GLNG Week 38

GLNG COMMENTARY GLNG
Senegal looking more attractive after latest offshore discovery
BP and its partners say that the Yakaar-Terenga deepwater field contains more than 480 bcm of gas
PERFORMANCE
WHAT:
Like Greater Tortue- Ahmeyim, Yakaar-Terenga appears to hold enough gas to justify the construction of an LNG plant.
WHY:
The discovery has come to light just in time to draw investors to Senegal’s upcoming offshore bidding round.
WHAT NEXT:
In the long term, Senegal hopes to use gas from the offshore zone to establish itself as an exporter and to promote economic development at home.
BP (UK) and its partners Kosmos Energy (US) and Petrosen (Senegal, state-owned) have reported another natural gas discovery at the Yakaar-Terenga deepwater field, located offshore Senegal.
On September 23, Kosmos said it had encountered approximately 30 metres of net gas pay in the Cenomanian strata of the Yakaar-2 appraisal well. The find was large enough to bring the reserve estimate for the field up from about 400bn cubic metres to more than 480 bcm, according to a statement from the office of Sene- gal’s President Macky Sall.
Strong potential
The discovery served to confirm that the field’s reservoir extends southward of the Yakaar-1 well and also maintained the winning streak of companies exploring the inboard Mauritania/ Senegal trend, Kosmos said. So far, the company noted, wells targeting this trend have had a suc- cess rate of 100%.
President Sall went further, saying that Yakaar-Terenga appeared to be part of the big- gest deposit of gas in West Africa. The field lies within a “wide structure on both sides of the bor- derbetweenSenegalandMauritania,”hesaid.
Yakaar-2 is not BP’s first discovery offshore
Senegal; Yakaar-1 was the largest gas find in the world in 2017. BP has also found about 425 bcm of gas at Greater Tortue-Ahmeyim, a field that straddles the Senegalese-Mauritanian border.
And there may be even more: BP, Kosmos and Petrosen hold licences for two blocks within the inboard Mauritania/Senegal trend – Cayar Profond and St. Louis Profond, which cover an area of around 33,000 square km in the offshore zone. Both Yakaar-Terenga and Greater Tor- tue-Ahmeyim lie within this area, which may hold as much as 1.4-2.8tn cubic metres of gas, according to BP’s estimates.
Long-term benefits
These discoveries have the potential to spur sig- nificant economic growth in Senegal over the long term.
Some of this growth will stem from invest- ment in upstream operations – namely, funds for the development of the gas fields. But BP and its partners also plan to spend billions of dollars on the downstream end.
In late 2018, they made a final investment decision (FID) that provided for using some of the gas from Greater Tortue/Ahmeyim for domesticgasificationprojectsinMauritaniaand Senegal, leaving the rest to serve as feedstock for
Kosmos said that the field was large enough to support two stages
of development, with gas from the first phase going to domestic buyers and gas from the second phase feeding another LNG plant.
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Week 38 26•September•2019