Namcor and Sonangol promoting offshore Namibe Basin
By Dev George, Houston
Namibia's National Petroleum Corporation (Namcor) and its Angolan counterpart, the state oil company Sonangol, recently toured oil capitals to tempt operators with the prospects of oil in the Namibe Basin offshore Namibia and Angola in the deep waters of the Atlantic. At the seminar in Houston, 65 companies attended, in London, more than 100 were there.
A joint study of the Basin, which straddles the West African nations' boundary with one another—the southern coastline of Angola and the northern reaches of Namibia and the adjacent offshore areas—notes that this is the last unexplored hydrocarbon-prospective sub-basin within the West African Salt Basin (WASB) province.
Within the WASB, some of the region's most prospective sub-basins can be found, including Douala, Rio Muni, Gabon, Congo, and Kwanza. When paired with their South American Brazilian margin counterparts, they show characteristic features that are reflected in the basement configuration, syn-rift geometry, and post-rift sedimentation and shows the Namibe Basin upper plate related to the lower plate Santos Basin of Brazil.
The Namibe Basin has a west-dipping monoclinal structure oriented along a north-south strike. Its ocean-continent boundary is located proximal to the 2500 meter bathymetric contour, where there is a significant change of slope in the sea floor profile, and is demarcated by significant volcanic injection into the overlying sediment. The Basin is almost 120 km wide, including a 60 km-wide basin slope and a 10-60 km wide platform region.
The West African Salt Basin has extensive development of lacustrine, marine, and deltaic reservoirs throughout the stratigraphic section. Significant Tertiary submarine channels and lobes, Albian shelf-edge carbonate banks, and syn-rift sequences can be identified in the Namibe Basin.
The state companies have invited 165 international oil companies and individuals to apply for exploration licenses in the area and expect to license all available leases. Blocks available in the Angolan area of the Basin (Blocks 11, 12, 13, 27, 28, 29, and 30) range from 4500 to 5000 sq km in size. Only one block is available in the Namibian sector, Block 1811, which is 10,000 sq km in size. At this time, just one exploration license is held in the Namibe Basin, Block 1711, by the US operator Vanco and its joint venture partners.