MARRAKESH: Morocco is enjoying an oil and gas drilling bonanza, with 27 wells planned this year, a senior energy official said on Wednesday, amid growing foreign interest in the kingdom's potential offshore reserves.
"In 2013 and 2014 we have witnessed an unprecedented period of growth" in upstream activity, Amina Benkhadra, the head of Morocco's Office of Hydrocarbons and Mining (ONHYM), told an energy conference in Marrakesh on Wednesday.
This includes a vast amount of seismic data being gathered, and 27 wells being drilled this year in the onshore and offshore, compared with four in 2013, she told hundreds of industry representatives.
The North African country has made no significant discoveries to date, importing virtually all its energy needs and battling to reduce its unaffordable oil subsidies.
But improved offshore drilling technology, a benign investment climate and similar geology in prospective regions elsewhere in the Atlantic, like Canada's Nova Scotia, are encouraging companies to search for Morocco's potential subsea riches, oil executives say.
There are now 34 oil companies operating on 131 exploration and five reconnaissance permits, Benkhadra said, when 15 years ago the country had just a handful of foreign partners exploring for oil and gas.
Reflecting the industry's growing interest in Morocco and boosting the government's hopes, Chevron and BP arrived last year, joining the two other major players in the upstream, Repsol and Total.
Chevron is due to start seismic shooting next week on acreage it acquired off the coast of Agadir, while drilling kicked off in March at one of the three deepwater exploration blocks that BP farmed into.
Other smaller oil firms active in the exploration frontier country include British-based explorers Cairn Energy and Gulfsands Petroleum, Turkey's Genel Energy and Texas-based Kosmos Energy, which found the Jubilee oil field off Ghana.
Kosmos, which sold stakes to BP in three of its offshore blocks, also has acreage in the waters of the disputed Western Sahara, where it plans to sink a well later this year or in early 2015, despite objections by the pro-independence Polisario Front.
The drilling conducted in March on its Foum Assaka block, which was unsuccessful, took place in water depths of 2,000 metres, the deepest offshore well so far drilled in Morocco.
Carl Atallah, the country manager of Chevron, which acquired three deepwater concessions last year, mostly in depths of 3-4,000 metres, says part of their appeal is that this area has not been explored before.
"But exploration is a risky business, and even in a success case, it will be a very long time before Morocco sees the kind of benefits associated with oil and gas production," he cautioned.
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