According to a senior government official, Sierra Leone will not open its next round of oil and gas licensing until after the results of a recently launched offshore 3D seismic survey, its first in more than ten years. The six-week seismic survey was initiated in May by consulting firm GeoPartners in collaboration with the government’s petroleum directorate as part of an effort to de-risk exploration in the offshore basin of Sierra Leone.
“The reprocessing of that data is happening now with our multi-client partners, TGS, and we are hoping to get something to push to the market in October,” Foday Mansaray, director general at the Sierra Leone Petroleum Directorate, said of a potential licensing launch date.
The senior official stated that the West African nation, where oil had previously been found but not in commercial quantities by Russia’s Lukoil and the then-Anadarko Petroleum, might offer up to 60 offshore blocks in its sixth round of oil and gas auctions. Twenty-three was the end of the last round.
According to him, ultra-deep regions that are typically available for direct talks are unlikely to be included in the new blocks. Mansaray stated that Sierra Leone has an estimated 30 billion barrels of oil equivalent recoverable offshore, including the sizable Vega prospect that Anadarko had previously discovered, which has about 3 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Located between regional oil-producing nations like Senegal to the north and the Ivory Coast to the south, as well as along the Atlantic coast, Sierra Leone is eager to establish itself as a new frontier for exploration. Some of its licensed data has been acquired by Shell, Petrobras, Hess, and Murphy Oil over the last 18 months, according to Mansaray. Guyana and Namibia are used as examples.
“I firmly believe that Sierra Leone is on the cusp of something big and we are going to be one of the next big and successful stories,” Mansaray concluded.