Liberia has opened 33 offshore blocks for direct negotiations after cancelling the country’s licensing round.
Liberia has opened 33 offshore blocks for direct negotiations after cancelling the country’s licensing round.
Direct negotiations for the blocks covering the offshore Harper and Liberia basins will run to 31 May, 2022. During this period, exploration companies can express their interest in any of the offered blocks. Applicants are requested to demonstrate their technical, and financial capacities before submitting their best offers.
The Government of Liberia decided to offer blocks through direct negotiation because of ‘the recent investment climate and the latent impact of the energy transition, Covid-19 and its cascading effect on the sector.’
‘While the 2020 bid round yielded positive and strong interests, the government believes that companies were challenged, based on numerous factors, in competition for offshore acreage. Therefore, the Government of Liberia, through LPRA, following a six-month extension, has indefinitely suspended the 2020 bid round and opted for direct negotiations to extenuate the current hurdle faced by international exploration and production companies and to offer an attractive opportunity for investment in Liberia.’
Big geological discoveries have been made offshore Liberia with a range of multi-client data across this acreage including 50,487 km of 2D and 31,350 km2 of 3D seismic, gravity and magnetic data, and well data. In addition, syn-rift and post-rift traps (both stratigraphic and structural) can be identified over much of the area, which offers multi-level prospectivity, with direct analogues to producing fields in neighbouring basins. Also, modelling predicts the source rock maturity and expulsion post-dates the main tectonism in the basin, and regional seal presence is evident as in other West African Transform Margin analogues. Lastly, volumetric assessment of these features suggests field sizes of more than a billion barrels of oil in place could be present.
Find out more at https://info.tgs.com/ liberia-license-round-2020.
