Namibia’s Mopane Gas Find Estimated to Hold 10 Billion Barrels of Oil
Illustrative photo.
Portuguese oil company Galp Energia said on Friday it had completed the first exploration phase at the Mopane prospect, offshore Namibia, and estimated that the area could hold at least 10 billion barrels of oil.
Galp said it tested the well named Mopane-1X in January and another well named Mopane-2X in March. In both wells, drilled about 8 km apart, it said it found significant light oil pay in high-quality sandstone reservoirs.
The Mopane prospect is located in the Orange Basin, along the coast of the southern African country where Shell and France’s TotalEnergies have also made some oil and gas discoveries.
Galp said the flow rates achieved during the tests were constrained to a maximum of 14,000 barrels per day, potentially supporting the view that Mopane could be a significant commercial discovery and one of the largest globally.
“Mopane alone is estimated to hold recoverable hydrocarbons in place of around 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent or more,” Galp said.
Galp holds an 80% stake in Petroleum Exploration License 83 (PEL 83), which covers an area of nearly 10,000 square km in the Orange Basin.
Namibia could become a new source of revenue for Galp, which already has large investments offshore Brazil and is also present in Mozambique’s Rovuma natural gas basin.
Galp has previously said it could bring in other partners for its Namibia projects as it estimates they could reach a large scale.
An African industry official told Reuters that the OPEC+ group of oil producers had lost Angola, which produces about 1.1 million barrels per day, so other members have in recent years been eyeing Namibia in case it can become Africa’s fourth-largest oil producer within the coming decade.
Oil fields discovered in Namibia’s Orange Basin (Source: New Direct)
Majors have already discovered about 11 billion barrels of oil in other nearby offshore resources, with first production expected in 2030. Adding Mopane would bring the total to 21 billion barrels.
Before Galp’s latest discovery, two other big finds – Shell’s Graff and TotalEnergies’ Venus – had already raised the prospect of the country not only becoming a new oil producer, but a major one with potentially many billions of barrels of oil and cubic meters of gas.
Graff holds an estimated 1.7 billion barrels of oil and gas across three wells, according to Barclays, while Venus is even bigger with 3 billion barrels of oil equivalent. It was the world’s second-largest deepwater oil discovery since 2015 and Namibia could be in the top 15 global oil producers by 2035 if its output develops as planned, Prime Minister Saara Kuungonelwa-Amadhila has said.
The addition of the extra supplies would help OPEC+ add about 700,000 bpd to its collective output. That figure could rise further if additional exploration work proves successful. Namibia’s inclusion would also give OPEC a stronger hand in directing price moves, the main aim of adding new members.
Reference: Reuters
