ASX Junior Takes First Mover Advantage in Largest Undrilled Onshore Oil & Gas Prospect in Africa
With gas prices rising in tandem with the rampaging oil price, an ASX junior has bagged a dominant acreage position covering potentially the largest, seismically defined, undrilled hydrocarbon structure onshore Africa.
The company has a majority interest in 250,000 acres of highly prospective gas condensate territory in Africa’s Cabora Bassa Basin, Zimbabwe.
This is the largest discovery in 40 years and the largest undrilled prospect in Africa.
Today’s ASX junior has picked up an 80% interest in the Cabora Bassa Project, a gas-condensate exploration project and has just identified the potential for oil in their acreage too. The Cabora Bassa Basin has all the ingredients of a working petroleum system and the project comes with a robust dataset via a US$30 million spend by Mobil in the early 1990s, including seismic data.
Mobil — now US$344 billion-capped Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) — was lured to the Cabora Bassa Basin in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s by the size and potential that had been identified by regional aeromagnetic surveys, which revealed thick sedimentary sequences within the rift basin.
Mobil identified and mapped the massive Mzarabani anticline in Africa, which has an area of more than 200 square kilometres, under closure, at favourable depths to host a conventional gas target.
The size of this target at over 200km2, is substantially bigger than the Waitsia Gas Field discovered by AWE in 2014 which was largest onshore gas discovery in Australia in 40 years. The Waitsia Gas Field is approximately 1 Tcf (trillion cubic feet) in size has an area of around 65km2 which shows the magnitude of the Mzarabani Prospect by comparison. The Mzarabani Prospect is also a stacked target with several prospective horizons that can be tested by a single well with multiple bites at the cherry.
Yet Mobil didn’t develop the project at the time, as it was focusing mainly on oil producing assets due to there being a lack of a structured market for gas in the African region.
The project is not unlike recent large discoveries in the region, displaying similar characteristics to prolific interior rift basin petroleum systems in Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, Perth and Cooper-Eromanga basins.
This is an opportunity to secure first mover advantage and a dominant acreage position in the Cabora Bassa Basin and the company has planned a low-cost, high-impact work program to progress the prospect to farm-out or drill ready.
Besides the merits of the project itself, the timing couldn’t be any better.
Zimbabwe’s new President Emmerson Mnangagwa is welcoming foreign investment, declaring that “Zimbabwe is open for business”.
The new Zimbabwe Government and Ministry of Mines and Mining Development has signalled its desire to attract new foreign direct investment, particularly in the resources sector.
Also working in favour of the Cabora Bassa Project is the current Southern Africa power crisis and the lack of domestic energy security. The crisis is having a negative effect on growth in the region resulting in a huge push to adopt gas as an alternate energy source to coal.
An additional attraction is the fact that a recently appointed managing director of today’s company identified the project a decade ago and is a Zimbabwean national. The MD was attracted by the technical merits of the project, evident from extensive exploration previously undertaken by Mobil.
Since then the landscape has changed substantially with the potential for strong growth in domestic gas demand, as well as the prospect of exporting what could be a relatively low cost product into buoyant overseas markets.
And with the company due to release an independent prospective resource estimate this quarter, we could be seeing a potentially market moving development.
IVZ Price at posting:
5.3¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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