Challenger Energy said Wednesday that it had identified three sizeable prospects in its AREA Off-1 offshore block in Uruguay of between 1 to 2 billion barrels and that the company said it would launch a farm-out process "following unsolicited interest from a number of industry counterparties."
The company said that an initial prospect inventory of 1 to 2 billion barrels had been defined from its 2D seismic reprocessing work.
According to Challenger Energy, three sizeable prospects – Teru Teru, Anapero, and Lenteja - have thus far been identified, derived from a range of play types consistent with those de-risked by recent successful conjugate margin drilling in Namibia by TotalEnergies and Shell, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Challenger Energy said that the objective is for the company to accelerate value realization from the AREA OFF-1 license in Uruguay by introducing a strategic partner(s) during 2023, to fast-track 3D seismic acquisition, potentially via a multi-client acquisition in early 2024, as a precursor to further value-creating field activity.
Eytan Uliel, Chief Executive Officer of Challenger Energy, said: "In 2020, when no other parties were ready to commit, Challenger Energy [then known as Bahamas Petroleum] was first-mover into offshore Uruguay, securing the AREA OFF-1 block on an uncontested basis and on highly advantageous work terms. Since then, margin-opening discoveries offshore Namibia by TotalEnergies and Shell have made it possible to correlate what are now proven, oil producing source rocks directly across into the conjugate margin basins of Uruguay's waters.
"As a result, Uruguay has become a new global exploration hotspot, evidenced by the fact that in the last 12 months all but one of the available offshore blocks have been licensed by oil majors and NOCs, bidding sizeable work programs.
In direct response to the exploration success in adjacent analogue basins and the emerging industry interest it generated, we committed to remaining ahead of the game, and in late 2022 opted to accelerated our AREA OFF-1 work program. The goal was to generate a newly derived, modern dataset supporting prospect definition. The resulting prospect inventory is now informed by reprocessed legacy 2D seismic, supported by AVO attribute analysis (hugely significant as this technique is widely used in the industry as a key indicator of potential hydrocarbons), and corroborated by additional geochemical and seep analysis studies.
The results from this work have been extremely promising, in that we are now able to announce a technically supported prospect inventory of between 1 to 2 billion barrels in this globally attractive exploration hotspot.
Our next-step objective is to farm-out to an industry partner(s), so we can fast-track a 3D seismic acquisition. The high-quality data set we have now compiled, and the intellectual property created, positions us well, and we will shortly be initiating a formal farm-out process.
The world for Challenger Energy is changing rapidly. I look forward to updating shareholders as the year progresses."