Taipan Resources’ wholly-owned subsidiary Lion Petroleum has entered into a Letter of Intent (LoI) with Greatwall Drilling Company of China to contract GW-190 rig for its planned well in northeast Kenya’s Block 2B
According to the company, a water well is presently being drilled and site preparation underway in advance of the delivery of the rig on the onshore Badada well site in the Anza Basin.
Taipan Resources has also contracted and is in the process of contracting with a number of local Kenyan companies for a range of services including site construction, road repair and the provision of food and other supplies.
It is expected that the well will be spud between mid-December 2014 and mid-January 2015, and will take approximately 70 days to complete.
The Badada well is targeting 251mn barrels of oil in the Tertiary rift play where evidence suggests there is an oil-prone lower Tertiary source. Taipan Resources said that it believes that there is significant potential for an oil-prone Tertiary play in Block 2B and believes there are similar structural elements on this block when compared to the initial discoveries in the Lokichar Basin of Kenya.
The Badada Prospect has been independently estimated by Sproule International Limited to have mean gross unrisked prospective resources of 251mn barrels of oil equivalent and high estimate gross unrisked prospective resources of 498mn barrels of oil equivalent.
The total estimated mean gross unrisked prospective resources on Block 2B is 1,593 mn barrels of oil equivalent based on 19 exploration leads.
The Anza Basin is reportedly one of the largest Tertiary-age rift basins in the East African Rift system that together contains multi-billion barrel oil discoveries.
Maxwell Birley, CEO of Taipan Resources, said, “We continue to believe that the ‘sweet spot’ of the Anza Basin is located on Block 2B. This is an exciting time for the Taipan Resources team and for our shareholders as we prepare to spud this well later this year.”
