Shell plans to allocate a quarter of its deep-water exploration budget for 2023 and 2024 to its oil and gas discoveries in Namibia’s Orange Basin.
“To give you a sense of our belief in Namibia, roughly a quarter of our deepwater exploration spending in 2023 and 2024 will be directed to Namibia. It is a theater that we fundamentally believe in, and we are looking to understand the optimal pathway for us to move forward,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said.
The oil major’s CEO said during the company’s third-quarter webcast that in the next six to nine months, Shell expects to drill an exploration well, an appraisal well, and carry out at least one more flow test, the results of which will help Shell understand the overall development pathway for its Orange Basin assets.
Shell has made four significant discoveries in Namibia to date: Graff, La Rona, Lesedi, and Jonker.
“We continue to like what we see. What’s particularly pleasing is that all of those wells drilled have been top quartile across every benchmark that we find in the wells space. So, as important as making a discovery is, making sure that we can actually outcompete when we drill those wells is a key area that we’re focused on… leveraging significant learnings we have across our global deepwater portfolio,” Sawan said.
Northern Offshore’s semi-submersible rig, Deepsea Bollsta, is drilling an appraisal well on Jonker, which could be the first field to be tapped by Shell, with the Jonker-1A appraisal well having spudded in late August.
Jonker-1A is being drilled more than 22 kilometers northwest of Jonker-1 probe, indicating the potential size of the discovery.
Jonker is estimated to hold about 2.5 billion barrels of oil in place, according to Namcor.
The French oil major, TotalEnergies, has allocated almost 50% of its global exploration budget of N$5.5 billion (US$300 million) to Namibia this year as it hopes to confirm a multibillion-barrel discovery on Block 2913b within the Orange Basin.-The Brief/Upstream
