Guinea-Conakry’s national oil company, the Société Nationale des Pétroles de Guinée (Sonap), has launched a self-funded onshore exploration campaign designed to build a compelling investment case for its acreage before engaging international partners — a confident reversal of the traditional model in which African nations wait for foreign capital to take the first risk.
“You want people to invest, you have to demonstrate that you’re ready to act,” said Deputy Managing Director Fama Bangaly Soumaoro. “We don’t want to plead with people to come to us.” The program includes geophysical and geochemical surveys across onshore basins, with stratigraphic drilling targeting depths of more than 3,000 metres in partnership with data firm TGS. Sonap has also purchased its own field equipment and is training its technicians to interpret results.
The data generated will be used to reduce subsurface uncertainty and build the investment case for Guinea’s 27 open blocks, which sit within an 80,000 square kilometre basin area backed by 15,000 square kilometres of 3D seismic and 42,000 square kilometres of 2D seismic coverage. Soumaoro positioned the onshore campaign as a strategic bridge: “For offshore, investments are really high and partners are not willing to take the risk,” he said, framing onshore results as the path to unlocking the more capital-intensive offshore licensing process.
Guinea’s onshore basins share the same geological system as neighbouring Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, and a hydrogen discovery in Mali has reinforced scientific views that the West African sedimentary basin extends further than previously mapped — a detail that could significantly raise the prospectivity of Guinea’s acreage.
Source: prospect-intel.com