Joint venture partners APA Corporation and TotalEnergies have declared the Awari exploration well offshore Suriname “noncommercial” in a rare disappointment for investors in a block that has seen five discoveries since 2020.
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TotalEnergies completed drilling the Awari well, failing to find commercial hydrocarbon volumes, APA said in a press release.
“Drilling operations have concluded at the Awari exploration prospect in the previously untested northwest portion of Block 58. The well was deemed noncommercial,” APA said.
TotalEnergies is the operator of the block, while each holds a 50% working interest.
Block 58 has so far stunned investors since the JV’s first discovery there in January 2020, along with four others since.
This discovery led investment bank Morgan Stanley to announce that the block could contain 6.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil resources, with it believed to contain the same petroleum fairway running through the nearby Stabroek Block in Guyana.
Investors are now looking to flow-test results from the Sapakara South (SPS-2) well in the same block. The JV plans to start flow-test operations soon, with results anticipated in December.
SPS-2 is 4.6 kilometers south of Saparaka South-1, which last year encountered some 30 meters of net black oil pay “in a single zone of high-quality Campano-Maastrichtian reservoir”.
Based on the success of exploration so far in Suriname, on Monday, the country’s state-run Staatsolie Hydrocarbon Institute (SHI) announced the launch of bidding for six new exploration blocks in the Demerara acreage, which remains extremely underexplored. The blocks up for grabs are east of recent discoveries made by TotalEnergies and Apache, and are in water depths running from 400 meters to 3,500 meters. Bids for the new blocks will be submitted by the end of May next year, and bidding opened on Monday.