The Uruguayan national regulatory agency, Administración Nacional de Combustibles Alcohol y Pórtland (ANCAP), has formally approved Challenger Energy’s bid for the AREA OFF-3 licence, submitted last month
Challenger Energy secures AREA OFF-3 licence. (Credit: Grant Durr on Unsplash)
Caribbean and Americas-focused oil and gas company Challenger Energy has secured regulatory approval for the award of the AREA OFF-3 licence, offshore Uruguay.
The Uruguayan national regulatory agency, Administración Nacional de Combustibles Alcohol y Pórtland (ANCAP), has formally approved the company’s bid for the licence.
Challenger Energy submitted its bid for the AREA OFF-3 licence last month and expects that the award of the licence will take three to four weeks.
The process for all the remaining approvals, finalisation and formal signing of the licence documentation is expected to take around three to four months, said the company.
The licence is initially valid for an exploration period of four years.
Challenger Energy CEO Eytan Uliel then said: “We are delighted to advise that on 2 June 2023, ANCAP publicly announced the details of Challenger Energy’s offer for the AREA OFF-3 licence, which is the precursor step for the formal award of the licence to CEG, and which we understand should occur in the next 3-4 weeks.
“AREA OFF-3 possesses identified prospects of material scale, and our immediate work focus will be a comprehensive technical reassessment of the block, applying modern 2D seismic re-imaging and our subsurface knowledge of the Uruguayan offshore margin, similar to the successful geotechnical de-risking approach we have applied on AREA OFF-1.”
AREA OFF-3 lies in relatively shallow water, with existing 2D and 3D seismic coverage.
It is the only remaining block available offshore Uruguay, while all other offshore exploration licences are held by major energy companies such as Shell, Apache and YPF.
The licence, which covers around 13,252km2, will increase the company’s total acreage holdings, making it the second largest offshore acreage holder in Uruguay, only after Shell.
It has an estimated resource potential of up to nearly 500 million barrels of oil equivalent (mmboe) and up to nine trillion cubic feet of gas (TCF), from multiple exploration plays.