The search for oil is on

DRILLING for oil off the Namibian coast might start by late 2011.
Tower Oil, a British exploration company, remains confident that they’re sitting on ten billion barrels of oil on Walvis Ridge off the Skeleton Coast.

Releasing their 2008 financial results yesterday, Tower Executive Chairman Peter Kingston said the interpretation of updated two-dimensional seismic data has confirmed huge potential over all three their license blocks and has ‘increased confidence in prospectivity’ of the project.Tower Oil, through its local subsidiary Neptune Petroleum Namibia, enjoys a 15 per cent shareholding in the licence blocks. The rest belongs to Arcadia Petroleum, a UK-based financier.Kingston said much of last year was spent on interpreting two-dimensional data. This has now been completed and Tower will embark on a large three-dimensional seismic survey by the last quarter of 2009.Detailed interpretation is scheduled for most of next year, Kingston said.’This approach will substantially reduce the risk of selecting the first well location, but would delay drilling of a first well until late 2011 at the earliest.’Although this is much later than Tower’s scheduled drilling in Uganda this year, Kingston pointed out that the scale of Namibia’s newly confirmed reserve potential ‘has further increased the high expectations of the Tower Board’.Namibia remains a ‘very significant follow-up’ to Tower’s operations in Uganda, he said.Neptune and Arcadia have informed Government of their plans to start their second exploration phase at the end of September. During this phase, seismic data will be collected over an area of 1 500 square kilometres.However, Kingston has warned that Namibia should get it hopes up too early that it has struck black gold.Should Tower find oil, it will be a good decade before Namibia will be able to reap the benefits.Once they’ve struck oil, it will take another two years to establish whether the resource is commercially viable. If so, another five years of planning will be necessary, according to Kingston.jo-mare@namibian.com.na