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Strategies & Market Trends : Dino's Bar & Grill -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Goose94 who wrote (9577)	10/13/2014 9:59:06 AM
From: Goose94	Respond to of 203432

Taipan Resources (TPN-V) books rig for Badada year-end spud The moment of truth is approaching for Vancouver's Taipan Resources, which has booked a rig for its Badada well on Block 2B in northeast Kenya for a year-end spud. Taipan Resources was a TSX Venture cash shell that in 2012 acquired Lion Petroleum, a privately-owned company that had secured a large acreage position in Kenya at ground-floor entry prices just prior to its emergence as an exciting hydrocarbon province. Taipan successfully brought in partners to reduce it risk exposure and shoulder the costs of wildcatting in the remote Anza Basin. Now its long-held belief in the prospectivity of this acreage is to be put to the test, with the drilling of the Badada prospect targeting 251 million barrels in the Tertiary rift play. This is a high risk drill but the company said the 1989 Hothori-1 well did provide some evidence for an oil-prone lower Tertiary source and it also says there are some structural similarities with the ground-breaking Tullow Oil discoveries in the Lokichar Basin. Taipan has a 30 per cent interest alongside FTSE 250 company Premier Oil and AIM-quoted Tower Resources. This ensures the TSX Venture-listed company will be fully carried throught he upcoming drill. A letter of intent has been issued for the Chinese rig GW-190 and ground broken on the well site in preparation of its arrival. The well is expected to spud between mid-December and mid-January, with a 70 day drill planned. The Anza Basin, to the east of the Tullow finds in the Lokichar, is one of the largest Tertiary-age rift-basins in the East African Rift system but is very underexplored. What little exploration there has been in recent times has pointed to gas rather than oil. This summer Africa Oil and its 50/50 partner Marathon Oil hit gas with the Sala-1 well in Block 9, some 60 km from Badada. Sala-1 drilled to more than 3,000 metres and tested dry gas at a rate of 6 million cf/d from a 25-metre net pay interval in the Cretaceous – there were also oil shows. Taipan's exploration manager Paul Logan, speaking at the time, took comfort from the Sala-1 discovery, saying it significantly de-risked the prospectively of the Anza Basin. “Sala-1 is believed to have tested a Cretaceous rollover structure against the Lagh Bogal Fault in a similar position to the Badada prospect, but at a much deeper stratigraphic level,” said Logan. Logan is a former chief geologist for Heritage Oil in Uganda, a track record that adds real credibility to Taipan's subsurface claims – this is underscored by the fact C$38 million market cap Taipain remains as operator during the exploration phase, with Premier assuming operatorship if the project advances to development. Logan added: “Badada-1 will test an as yet, undrilled thick Tertiary sequence of probable Miocene age, similar to that present in the Kingfisher Field in the Albert Basin of Uganda and the Tertiary discoveries of the Lokichar basin in Kenya.”These references to the oil-rich Albertine and Lokichar basins show Taipan is hoping for oil. Max Birley, CEO of Taipan, says the company believes Block 2B lies in the “sweet spot” of the Anza Basin and that the Badada-1 well will find oil. Importantly, this just one of 19 exploration leads on the block: Sproule International reckons the acreage could host mean gross unrisked prospective resources of almost 1.6 billion boe. Taipan will have a second chance with the drillbit next year when Afren drills the first well on Block 1. Here Taipan, having cured its default by paying US$3.5 million to Afren to restore its rights, has a 20 per cent interest in the large 22,246 sq km block on the borders of Somalia and Ethiopia. There's an oil seep in the southwest portion of the block while the northern portion is an extension of the Ogaden Basin that in Ethiopia, which is reckoned to host some 4 TCF of gas. The first well is planned H2 2015, targeting either the Khorof or El Wak prospects with gross resources of 78 to 500 million barrels.