Chariot secures extension of Mauritania exploration license
LONDON -- Chariot and its partners—Cairn Energy and the SociétéMauritanienne des Hydrocarbures et de Patrimoine Miner (SMHPM)—have secured a one-year extension on the current exploration phase of license C-19 in Mauritania.
As part of the extension, the partnership has committed to undertake seabed coring studies, which will provide further subsurface detail and serve to further de-risk this part of the portfolio.
Chariot is the operator of Block C-19 with an interest of 55%. Cairn holds 35% and SMHPM holds a 10% carried interest.
During 2014, the partnership carried out a significant amount of additional technical work on its 3,500 km2 of proprietary 3D seismic data, which included specialized processing, iterative interpretation and spectral decomposition analysis.
From this, Chariot has identified and matured a significant prospect and lead portfolio, which includes four prospects that are now drill ready. These prospects have been independently validated by Netherland Sewell and Associates (NSAI) and a dataroom is open as part of an additional partnering process.
These prospects in Block C-19 are located down-dip from the legacy Ras al Beida-1 well, which encountered good, thick sands and extensive oil shows and are along strike from the Aigrette-1 well, which encountered an oil leg in a 20-m sand interval.
Chariot has identified four priority prospects all of which have been independently audited by NSAI, who estimate that the single target PA-1 and MA-1 prospects have gross mean prospective resources of 431 MMbbl and 588 MMbbl, respectively.
The KT-1 and BFT-1 prospects are interpreted to comprise stacked deep water sandstone targets located in a combination of structural and stratigraphic trapping geometries in the Cretaceous and overlying Tertiary section. Individual targets in these prospects are estimated by NSAI to contain a range of gross mean prospective resources of up to 434 MMbbl.
"The evaluation of the prospectivity across this acreage has taken longer than expected; however, we are very pleased with the scale of the substantial prospect and lead inventory that has been generated as a result of this work. Success from drilling any one of these prospects would be transformational for Chariot," Larry Bottomley, Chariot’s chief executive, said.
