Repsol to Start Drilling in April

Spanish oil and gas company Repsol Namibia, and its partners Tower Resources and Arcadia Expro Namibia, will start the drilling of the Welwitchia-1 well on 14 April, in their licence blocks 1810A, 1911 and 2011A offshore Namibia, the Ministry of Mines said on 1st April. The drilling is expected to be completed towards the end of May with hopes of finding commercially viable amounts of oil this time around.
This will be the seventh offshore well to be drilled in Namibia since 2008 and the 22nd offshore well since exploratory drilling started in Namibia in 1974. The ministry has been very aggressive in its promotion and licensing efforts in the last 10 years with thousands of 2D and 3D seismic data collected over the lengths and breaths of the Exclusive Economic Zone that there is hardly a block that has not been intersected by a seismic line offshore Namibia. Over the same period US$1 billion (N$10 billion) has been spent in Namibia on oil and gas exploration.
Last year the first oil sample in Namibia was discovered by a Brazilian Oil and Gas Company HRT, though not in commercially viable amounts, proving the existence of two mature source rocks in the oil generating window and confirming that there is an active petroleum system in the basins where the wells were drilled. This has attracted additional interest from other big exploration companies such as Tullow, Shell, Murphy, OMV and Impact who have all bought shares in various blocks in Namibia over the past few months.
A Murphy-OMV joint-venture – after having bought shares from Brazilian Cowan Petroleum - is currently also reported to start 3D seismic surveys in the second quarter of 2014. (The Namibian/SADOCC)