Duma Energy, the oil and gas production firm with a solid domestic footprint of interests in Illinois and Texas (both onshore and offshore in Galveston Bay), has been making significant progress at their Owambo Basin assets over in northern Namibia recently, where the company holds 39% working interest in a giant, 5.3M acre onshore petroleum concession. The latest report out of DUMA’s exploration concession in the Owambo Basin (July 9) has established UK-based survey firm, Bridgeporth Ltd., running extensive gravity magnetic analysis on four key blocks (1714A, 1715, 1814A, and 1815A) of the massive concession, which is roughly the size of Massachusetts.
This latest aerial survey work will achieve a much higher spatial resolution than anything previously done on the huge concession, less than 15% of which is even covered by an old 2D dataset composed of information from 1960-1990. The other concession holder on the Owambo property is privately held, Hydrocarb Energy Corp., with whom DUMA signed the farm-in deal late last year. Houston-headquartered Hydrocarb has the Petroleum Agreement on Owambo with the Republic of Namibia and also has a great deal of experience working underexplored oil and gas in highly prospective, emerging regions around the world, with offices in Abu Dhabi and the UAE, as well as their offices in Windhoek, Namibia.
Chairman and CEO of DUMA, Jeremy Driver, pointed to operator Hydrocarb’s previous detailed geologic and geochemical field analysis on Owambo (study prepared by Weatherford Laboratories out of Houston) as indicating the potential for an active petroleum system on the site and asserted that both companies were really eager to get through this current phase of field work on the project. Given that the target here is potentially in excess of a billion barrels of oil, the sense of urgency shared by DUMA and Hydrocarb is understandable and this latest effort paves the way nicely for a more comprehensive seismic acquisition program in the near future, so the two companies are currently laser-focused on mapping out the route ahead with some much-needed gravity magnetic analysis.
The next step after this gravity magnetic work will be drafting a modern 2D seismic data grid, with projections set for early next year to have accomplished this task, taking time in the interim to ensure that the structural setting and depth to basement model delineated by the gravity magnetic work is accurate. Confidence is high at DUMA regarding Owambo and we should see some interesting numbers here in early 2014.
Back here at home in Galveston Bay, the potential kicked up by 3D seismic data reported in May has sparked the company’s interest in the potentially high-pressure, high-volume pay zones believed to exist under the bay and in the outlying areas. This 3D seismic data was collected as part of a larger effort by some of the top independent oil companies in the region, designed to flesh-out the true deeper horizon potential in the bay. DUMA is now looking more optimistically at the future of their roughly 18k acres of territory here, confident that while the company has not publicly assigned any reserve value to these deeper horizons (as past engineering reports have failed to indicate anything significant), the interest of these other companies, including leasing and seismic activity, is ample cause to think there is much more potential in the bay than just the prolific Frio intervals at shallower depths they’ve been exploiting.
For more info on Duma Energy Corp., visit www.Duma.com
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