100% success rate continues offshore Mauritania/Senegal

by Elaine Reynolds

Kosmos Energy's play extending gas discovery well Marsouin-1 continues the 100% success rate seen offshore Mauritania and Senegal in the last year. Kosmos' success follows on from its Tortue gas discovery earlier this year, while Cairn Energy had back to back oil discoveries to the south in Senegal towards the end of 2014. Now both companies are undertaking full appraisal and exploration programmes that will see activity continuing in the region into 2017.Together these two programmes offer the potential of up to twelve exploration and appraisal catalysts over the next eighteen months, a rare occurrence in the current low oil price environment.

Marsouin -1 and Tortue-1 locations and Petroleum System map

Marsouin-1 has de-risked a potential resource base of 5TCF in the Marsouin Anticline. Drilling will now return to the  Ahmeyim anticline to the south containing the Tortue-1 discovery well where three appraisal wells (Guembuel-1, Ahmeyim-2 and Teranga-1) will be drilled into mid 2016 to prove up potential resources of c15TCF. Beyond this however, Kosmos will focus on targeting oil prone fairways to the north and south of Ahmeyim and Marsouin. From Q3 2016, the company is planning two exploration wells in Southern Senegal and one in Northern Mauritania with the intention of adding follow-on wells to the programme and which would see drilling continuing here to the end of 2017.

Cairn/FAR well locations

Meanwhile, this month, Cairn and partner FAR Energy spudded the first well in a minimum three well exploration and appraisal programme to further evaluate the 330mmbbl SNE-1 discovery in Senegal. SNE-2 is located 3km to the north of SNE-1, and will target the centre of the field in order to encounter  maximum hydrocarbon density. Drilling and coring is expected to take around six weeks with a further four weeks for testing. SNE-3 will then test the southern extent of the field with a similar programme of data gathering, followed by BEL-1, which will test the northern extension together with an added exploration target of 157mmbbls recoverable resources sitting above SNE. The programme has been designed to establish the continuity and connectivity of the reservoir and to demonstrate productivity as these will be key to the future commerciality of the project.