Brazil’s HRT Participações em Petroleo and Portuguese partner Galp Energia began drilling their first well off Namibia’s coast this week, upping a bet that the frontier area will yield discoveries akin to the giant fields offshore of Brazil.
“The geology of this area is very similar to Angola and the Campos Basin of Brazil,” said Wagner Pires, the chief executive of HRT Americas, a Houston-based subsidiary of HRT that is operating the Namibia exploration campaign.
“Our work in Namibia has the potential to change the perspective of any company,” Pires said.
HRT, which is also exploring for oil and natural gas in Brazil’s Amazon with Russia’s TNK-BP, is counting on discoveries in Namibia to revive its share price.
The shares have lost 72 percent in the past 12 months and are down more than 90 percent from 2011 highs.
HRT plans to drill four wells on four prospects in Namibia during the current campaign. It sold a 14 percent stake in three of those prospects to Lisbon-based Galp last November.
The company was still looking to sell a stake in a fourth prospect, Pires said.
Also in November, HRT said US oil-field certification company DeGolyer & MacNaughton found that the four areas held 7.39 billion barrels of “mean potential prospective resources”, a preliminary estimate of the area’s potential based on seismic studies.
If that estimate is upheld by HRT and Galp’s drilling campaign, it would be an amount sufficient to supply all the needs of the US, the world’s largest consumer, for about 13 months.
“The prospects are beautiful, what we need now is a little bit of luck,” Pires, who previously helped run the Brazilian operations of US-based Devon, said last week.
Little is known about Namibia’s offshore area, where 11 wells have been drilled in recent decades without the discovery of significant commercial crude oil or gas accumulations. – Reuters