FAR Limited prepares to drill Gambia's first offshore well in 40 years

MELBOURNE -- FAR Limited has selected its final well location for the upcoming Samo-1 well in its Gambian exploration program. Following reprocessing and interpretation of 3D seismic data, detailed mapping of the Samo Prospect and detailed well engineering, FAR Gambia Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of FAR Limited, as Operator of the block A2 joint venture, has approved a Samo-1 well location.

The Samo Prospect lies immediately to the south and along trend from the giant SNE oil field in Senegal – a trend which has so far seen nine successful exploration and appraisal wells (at 100% success rate).

The Samo-1 well will be located in approximately 1,017 m water depth and 112 km offshore Gambia in the highly prospective Mauritania-SenegalGuinea-Bissau-Conakry (MSGBC) basin.

The Samo Prospect has two main targets; an upper reservoir interval which contained liquid-rich gas at SNE and a lower reservoir interval which was oil-bearing at SNE. The two target reservoir intervals are assessed to have a combined Prospective Resource of 825 MMbbl of oil* (best estimate, unrisked - refer ASX announcement of Nov. 21, 2017). Good quality reservoirs have been interpreted at both levels at the proposed Samo-1 well location and the well will be drilled on the crest of the structure.

The Samo-1 well is planned to spud in early fourth-quarter 2018 and is expected to take approximately 40 days to drill on a trouble-free basis.

Samo-1 will be the first well drilled offshore The Gambia for 40 years. The well will be drilled using the Stena DrillMax – a state of the art, dual mast, dynamically positioned, deepwater drillship with a rig crew that has extensive international and regional West African experience.