Page 5 - NorthAmOil Week 01 2021

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These firms will now be able to proceed to the the well in line with pre-drill planning.
final stage of the contest, he said. The well, which lies in the WA-359-P explora-
Osu did not name any of the shortlisted bidders tion permit, was drilled to a total depth of 5,618
or say when the department hoped to wrap up metres measured depth (MD) to intersect the
the licensing round. He stressed, though, that the Mungaroo Formation. The formation had been
bidding process was “still ongoing in line with our estimated to contain a prospective recoverable
published timelines on [the] DPR website and bid resource of 15 trillion cubic feet (424.8bn cubic
portal.” metres).
In Angola, the National Oil, Gas and Biofuels “Ironbark was a world-scale prospect in a
Agency (ANPG) has set a date for the launch of a highly prospective address, and it needed drill-
licensing round covering nine blocks in the Lower ing. We got an answer, but it was not the one we
Congo Basin and the Kwanza Basin. The contest wanted,” said NZOG CEO Andrew Jefferies.
had originally been due to take place in May 2020, He added that it would take some time before
but the agency has now committed to a start date the dry hole’s implications for the play were
of April 30, 2021. It will accept offers until June 9, understood.
2021, and all participating firms must be prepared WA-359-P had been expected to serve as a
to meet “[as] a mandatory condition of participa- backfill for the existing North West Shelf (NWS)
tion the payment of an entry fee in the amount of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project, given
$1mn, which will allow access to the data pack- that the permit is located just 50 km from exist-
ages related to the basins to bid,” ANPG said in a ing infrastructure. This plan now appears to be
statement. off the table, but Japan’s Mitsui & Co. and Beach
In other news, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Mines and recently greenlit the onshore Waitsia gas project
Petroleum has announced plans to exit the con- to serve as a new source of feedstock for the giant
tract it signed with US-based GreenComm Tech- export project.
nologies last April for the construction of a new Beach said on December 23 that Waitsia, its
gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant in the Somali region. 50:50 joint venture with Mitsui, had reached a
A ministry official confirmed earlier this week final investment decision (FID) on initial fund-
that the $3.6bn deal was being cancelled because ing for its 250 TJ (6.5mn cubic metres) per day
GreenComm had grossly misrepresented its tech- second-phase of development. The independent
nical and financial capabilities. said full funding would be committed once cer-
tain regulatory approvals and commercial con-
If you’d like to read more about the key events shaping ditions were resolved, with these anticipated to
Africa’s oil and gas sector then please click here for be wrapped up in the first quarter.
NewsBase’s AfrOil Monitor. Waitsia is considered to be one of the coun-
try’s largest onshore discoveries in the last four
AsianOil: BP’s dry hole offshore WA decades. Beach’s managing director Matt Kay
UK super-major BP’s Ironbark-1 exploration described it as “a world-class, low-cost, onshore
well offshore Western Australia has turned out gas resource,” saying that his company was
to be a dry hole, the developer’s junior partners “thrilled to be growing [its] portfolio in Western
announced last week. Cue Energy Resources, Australia.”
Beach Energy and New Zealand Oil and Gas
(NZOG) revealed on December 29 that “no sig- If you’d like to read more about the key events shaping
nificant hydrocarbon shows” had been encoun- Asia’s oil and gas sector then please click here for
tered. As such, BP intends to plug and abandon NewsBase’s AsianOil Monitor.

Week 01 07•January•2021 www. NEWSBASE .com P5