The Government of Liberia, through the Liberia Petroleum Regulatory Authority (LPRA), in collaboration with the National Oil Co. of Liberia (NOCAL), has opened 33 offshore blocks (LB-1 to LB-33) for direct negotiations. The blocks cover the Harper and Liberia basins.
The negotiation process runs from June 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022. Exploration companies can express interest in any of the offered blocks and applications will be processed on a continuous first-in exclusive basis. Applicants are asked to demonstrate technical financial capacities and submit best offers to undertake exploration on the desired blocks.
The government’s decision to offer blocks through direct negotiations is anchored on many factors including the recent investment climate, the latent impact of the energy transition, COVID-19 and its effect on the sector, but also a developing investor appetite for frontier basins, NOCL said in a release June 15.
The 2020 bid round yielded positive interests, the government said, but companies were challenged by various factors, and following a 6-month extension, the 2020 bid round was indefinitely suspended.
Multi-client data across the acreage, including 50,487 km of 2D and 31,350-sq km of 3D seismic, gravity and magnetic data, and well data, is available.
Syn-rift and post-rift traps (both stratigraphic and structural) over much of the area offer multi-level prospectivity, with direct analogues to producing fields in neighboring basins, NOCAL said. 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 over 1 billion bbl of oil in place could be present, it concluded.
