oil barrel article

08.01.2004
Aminex Encounters Logistical Delays As Reality Of Remote Tanzania Hits Home
Logistical hiccups have plagued the drilling of Aminex’s eagerly-awaited Nyuni-1 wildcat offshore Tanzania. The team had hoped to hit target depth well before year-end but one week into the January and Nyuni-1 is still drilling ahead.

“Operationally, it’s going magnificently and we’ve had no major drilling problems,” chief executive Brian Hall told oilbarrel.com. “The difficulty is the logistics. It is so remote and we are the only oil company working in the country.”

Nyuni-1 is being drilled using an F200 rig sited on Nyuni Island, some 45 km off the Tanzanian shoreline and presently home to 68 workers.

Although the region is widely cited as gas prone – Nyuni lies some 20 km north east of the 1 trillion cubic feet Songo Songo gas field – there are also well documented oil seeps in the area, including on Nyuni Island itself. A second well will test a separate but adjacent structure and will be drilled from nearby Okuza Island. Petroleum consultants Robertson Research reckon Nyuni could hold 260 million barrels of oil or 870 billion cubic feet of gas and Okuza could hold 100 million barrels of oil or 390 billion cubic feet. This is real wildcat territory: Aminex’s two-well drilling campaign is the first offshore drilling in Tanzania for more than a decade and with the exception of two Songo Songo delineation wells, no drilling has taken place in the Nyuni block.

“The geology is complicated and not exactly as we anticipated,” said Hall. “It looks like it will be a deeper well than we anticipated.”

Delays have crept in with equipment getting stuck in customs, rains making roads impassable and difficulties sourcing kit in a region with no history of oil exploration.

“When we worked in Russia, we felt that was remote,” said Hall. “But there you get hold of muds and chemicals or borrow things from your neighbour. Here we have no neighbours. We are real pioneers.”

Sometimes the pioneering spirit is only too real for the team: when local tugs and supply boats were busy, a dhow operated by local fishermen was employed instead to transport cuttings to the neighbouring island which housed a small airstrip in order to send the cuttings for analysis.

The delays will bump up exploration costs, as the rig is chartered on a day rate basis, but the Aminex team is running a tight ship on the ground. “This is not a gold-plated operation and we are trying to do things economically,” said Hall. “Even with the delays we will still be below our original budget of US$15-$18 million for two wells.”

The budget now stands at US$11.5 million for the two wells.

For Aminex, the delays have been frustrating. The Tanzanian drilling campaign has been a long time in the making and promises the only real upside for shareholders this year.

Aminex operates the 2,600 sq km Nyuni licence through its wholly-owned subsidiary Ndovu Resources (60 per cent) and is partnered by Bounty Oil & Gas (10 per cent) and Romanian state oil company Petrom (30 per cent).