Advances in seismic imaging, frontier data sets and faster permitting could ignite a new exploration renaissance in Africa, industry leaders said Africa Energy Week (AEW): Invest in African Energies 2025 in Cape Town.
- •According to Nikki Martin, President and CEO of EnerGeo Alliance, African oil and gas capital expenditure is expected to rise to $54 billion by 2030, following a $6 billion surge in exploration spending in 2024.
- •Industry leaders are pushing for better seismic and subsurface data to derrick projects, in addition to faster permitting given ‘limited budgets for global explorations.’
- •Such advances would matter beyond exploration, allowing for better efficacy and recovery in existing fields, a key step towards carbon capture and storage projects.
“Before you can do any AI-driven workflows, you need a dataset that illuminates what the subsurface looks like. The only basin that allows for large, regional high-quality datasets is the Gulf of America, which has allowed that basin to reinvent itself multiple times,” Chevron’s CEO, Gavin Lewis said.
Emmanuelle Garinet, VP of Exploration Africa at TotalEnergies pointed out that good data sets had helped derrick the Venus well in Namibia. Despite it being a frontier project, the exploration used the data to determine that it had more than a 50% probability of success.
Limited budgets mean that delays in obtaining permits become expensive for such projects, especially given the high capital costs already accounted. In the Republic of Congo, Garinet said, the company received its permit in less than six months. In other jurisdictions such as South Africa, legal challenges and other complexities often delay the permitting process, and with it, the project’s probability of being completed on time and within budget.
