Angola is preparing to launch its 2025 licensing round at the end of November, offering several blocks in the offshore Kwanza and Benguela basins as part of the country’s multi-year strategy to bolster oil and gas production through new developments.
The bid round will feature several promising assets, including Block 37, which contains the Omosi well discovered by ConocoPhillips in 2015. According to Matt Tyrrell, Vice President of Business Development at TROIS Geoconsulting, the Omosi-1 well unlocked a good reservoir with 2 trillion cubic feet of gas in place, with enormous potential within the block.
“There is potential for up to 10 trillion cubic feet of gas if all these pre-salt structures are charged,” Tyrrell explained, noting that Block 37 contains six to seven pre-salt structures.
Beyond the 2025 bid round, Angola is advancing several major offshore oil and gas developments. The Kaminho project, featuring the Cameia and Golfinho fields, is on track for production in 2028. Situated in Block 20 and operated by TotalEnergies, the project features massive pre-salt structures and is also home to the Orca discovery, previously known as the Baleia well.
Angola is also nearing first production for its New Gas Consortium project, with operations set to start in the first quarter of 2026. Developed by the NGC consortium, the project represents the fourth-biggest gas development in Africa. The project is being developed at a cost of $4 billion and targets 141 billion cubic feet per year.
Supporting the NGC development and other projects, TROIS Geoconsulting launched an extensive data acquisition and reprocessing program to improve geological understanding. The campaign included a new airborne AGG gravity acquisition covering 8,920 square kilometers with 500-meter line spacing, reprocessed onshore 2D seismic data, reprocessed well data, and a recovered or reprocessed 3D seismic data set. The data acquisition campaign took six years to complete, with the final phase featuring the reprocessing of 1970s datasets.
The program follows a series of presidential decrees enabling international operators to develop gas resources, most notably Presidential Legislative Decree No. 7/18 of May 18, 2018, which established the first specific legal and fiscal regime for natural gas development.
Source: energycapitalpower.com