Looks Good, page-7

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the nextoilrush link:

I thought that it was worth copying and pasting the opening few paragraphs .... interesting times ahead, that's for sure.....!!

FINALISED: 18-09-14 PUBLISHED: 19-09-14

Which Junior Oil Company is Being Chased Around Africa by Woodside?

Lately we’ve noticed an interesting trend in transactional activity in Africa.
Energy giant Woodside Petroleum has been taking up acreage positions around Africa which closely corresponds to Australian junior Pura Vida Energy (ASX: PVD).
The similarity in Woodside’s ‘Atlantic Margin Strategy’ and the acreage portfolio held by PVD is striking. Woodside have recently acquired acreage in offshore Morocco, **on, and East Africa – all areas where PVD holds an interest, and has done for quite some time.
PVD is more advanced in their exploration efforts than Woodside, and when you compare PVD’s tiny $60M market cap to the goliath Woodside’s $30BN, it is easy to see which company is more leveraged to oil exploration success.
These latest developments strengthen our view that PVD is emerging as a serious African oil explorer.
As we await news on a farm-in partner on PVD’s Nkembe offshore block in **on, a few weeks ago Italian oil major Eni announced a pre-salt discovery to the north of PVD’s block. Eni plan to continue drilling to find out the size of their discovery – this follows on from other discoveries offshore **on, which we will go into detail later.
Another two exploration wells are being drilled right now to the south of PVD’s **on block by ExxonMobil and Shell – we are following these drills closely – any discoveries may be a catalyst for PVD and should improve the value of their acreage.
PVD has also announced a significant resource upgrade to their **on block – with the net mean prospective resource (unrisked) now 1,344 mmbbo.
This new prospective resource (unrisked) was reached by PVD’s technical team who scoured existing seismic data and found a fistful of stacked prospects right across Nkembe.
PVD’s Nkembe Block has gone from highly promising to highly prospective and PVD is now going to use this new data to attract top tier farm-in partners and then, fingers crossed, start drilling into some of Africa’s hottest offshore acreage.
So the pre-salt potential of **on continues to build, and PVD’s own target resources have increased – this is all positive news for PVD during farm-in partner negotiations.
A successful farm out in **on would likely include drilling to test multiple targets plus covering of PVD’s past costs – which would be nice…
Turning to Morocco, PVD are on the home stretch to drilling billion barrel targets – just five months away now. The drill ship is now en route to Morroco – you can follow its progress on the live map below.
Soon we will witness the investment fervour of a huge drilling event – PVD are part of a JV holding a block of potentially 7BN barrels of oil (unrisked targets) – net to PVD is 1.6BN barrels.
The first well will target a gross mean resource potential of 1.5BN barrels, with 23% net to PVD.
That will be the first spudding of a two well, US$215M farm in deal PVD scored with Freeport McMoRan – two bites of a billion barrel oil cherry for PVD.
PVD are free carried for both of these wells…
As long term PVD investors ourselves, we are set now and are anticipating a pre-spud ramp up of share price as late investors pile in at likely premiums to current levels.
It’s shaping up to be an active summer. Not only are we looking forward to this drilling, we are expecting that news of a **on farm out to land any day now – surely before the end of the year…
PVD had over $20M in the bank account with no debt at the end of the last quarter and are fully funded for upcoming work commitments all the way through 2015 – the chances of further dilution for us long term PVD investors in the near term seems unlikely.
Throw in the upcoming seismic survey at PVD’s Madagascan acreage and a flurry of nearby drilling activity over Africa, and we are set for some active upcoming months.