Bahamas Petroleum Company announces Uruguay offshore licence award

Bahamas Petroleum Company has announced that, in its efforts to expand the Company’s portfolio options, it has been awarded the AREA OFF-1 petroleum licence offshore Uruguay.

Highlights

• BPC has been awarded the OFF-1 licence, offshore Uruguay

• OFF-1 contains a management estimated resource potential of up to one billion barrels of oil equivalent (BBOE), based on current mapping from multiple exploration plays and leads in relatively shallow waters with significant running room

• The OFF-1 licence play system is directly analogous to the prolific Cretaceous turbidite discoveries currently being evaluated/developed offshore Guyana and Suriname

• OFF-1 has an initial four-year exploration period, with a work obligation limited to reprocessing and reinterpretation of selected historical 2D seismic data – there is no drilling obligation, and the licence includes staged no-cost exit points at BPC’s sole election

• OFF-1 is thus comparable to the ‘low cost option’ represented by BPC’s licences in The Bahamas when they were first awarded – a modest work commitment over four years which secures a sizeable, technically high quality, frontier play, with regional seismic available and exciting exploration upside

• Uruguay is a stable, well-regulated operating environment with an attractive, internationally comparable fiscal regime

• BPC believes that OFF-1 has the capacity to generate similar value uplift to the Company’s existing licences in The Bahamas, where the Company’s primary focus remains commencement of exploration drilling on Perseverance-1, expected to spud in late 2020 / early 2021, and targeting recoverable P50 oil resources 0.77 billion barrels, with an upside of 1.44 billion barrels

Simon Potter, Chief Executive Officer of Bahamas Petroleum Company, said: ‘The scale of the opportunity that our planned drilling campaign in The Bahamas may unlock for us, at the end of 2020, means that our personnel are and will remain entirely focussed on their efforts to deliver the Perseverance-1 exploration well successfully.  

‘However, the current period of introspection in our industry is presenting nimble, forward-thinking companies such as ourselves with compelling opportunities to expand our portfolio and achieve countercyclical growth.

‘The recently-closed Open Licencing round in Uruguay presented exactly such an opportunity for us where, for very low cost, we have been able to secure an exploration licence of an extremely high-calibre that, even as recently as a few months ago, we most likely would have been outbid on by much larger players.  

‘We are especially pleased to have been awarded OFF-1 given that the licence represents a similarly underappreciated opportunity to that secured by the Company in 2007 in The Bahamas – a licence in a region with extensive existing seismic of various vintages, but largely underexplored, and requiring the application of more modern, state of the art seismic imaging technology and techniques to understand the full extent of the petroleum resource.  

‘We are confident that over the next four years we can bring to bear our expertise, gained in The Bahamas over the past decade, on OFF-1 so as to more fully evaluate the licence’s potential, in the hope that in the longer-term we can create an opportunity of equal value and industry interest to what we have thus far accomplished in The Bahamas.’

Source: Energy-pedia