Flag day: for Cooper in Tunisia
Cooper gets Bargou green light
Tunisia has confirmed the conversion of the Bargou permit, held by Australia’s Cooper Energy, from a two-year prospecting licence to a five-year exploration permit.
Cooper operates the licence, which includes both onshore and offshore areas along the coast of Gulf of Hammamet, with a 100% stake.
The company said its initial two years of work on the permit had identified “a large number” of leads and prospects with targets in several zones. This included a large “play concept” in the southern part of the region, which the company said was potentially analogous to the Isis oilfield, also off Tunisia.
Under the terms of the prospecting permit, Cooper has collated all the existing seismic and well data for the permit and has reprocessed 1671 kilometres of 2D seismic surveys. The results have been integrated with 14,000 kilometres of 2D seismic data from the nearby Hammamet Exploration Permit, it said.
The company said the southern part of the permit was “elephant hunting country” with several significant prospects including the Kuriate East and Ras Marsa prospects, with estimated mean undiscovered reserves of about 250 million barrels and about 340 million barrels of recoverable oil respectively.
Perth-based Cooper described the Kuriate East prospect as “ready to drill”.
Meanwhile, it said the north of the permit included a number of smaller but lower-risk prospects, including the Menzel Horr prospect with estimated recoverable reserves of 26 million barrels of oil.
The company said calculations by independent resource consultancy RPS Energy estimated mean prospective recoverable oil for the entire permit of 1.2 billion barrels of oil.
Cooper said it would continue work on the onshore Menzel Horr prospect with a view to drilling a well in 2009. It would also seek out partners to share the risk on drilling several offshore wells in future, it said.