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For years, the Kalahari Desert stretch of northeastern Namibia has drawn quiet interest from oil and gas explorers hoping to prove out what could be a meaningful onshore hydrocarbon basin. That interest took a concrete step forward this week. Reconnaissance Energy Africa Ltd. (OTCQX: RECAF, TSXV: RECO), commonly known as ReconAfrica, announced that it had produced natural gas to surface from its Kavango West 1X well, an event the company describes as the first-time hydrocarbons have ever been brought to surface onshore in Namibia.
The result came from testing in the Elandshoek formation, where three zones spanning 163 metres were perforated, treated with acid, and put through production tests. The uppermost of those zones, a 47 metre interval, was tested and flared on three separate occasions, with the well open to flow for roughly 24 hours in total. Natural gas and liquids came to surface at intermittent rates, though equipment limitations meant the company could not capture precise flow measurements.
What the company could measure was pressure, and that number is what has caught attention among industry watchers. Tubing pressure climbed between each test, reaching 2,300 psi through the 5-inch production casing ahead of the second flow test. Rising pressure between successive tests is generally read as a sign that the reservoir can keep delivering hydrocarbons rather than simply venting a one-time pocket of gas.
Attention now shifts upward in the wellbore. Crews are moving testing equipment to evaluate three zones in the shallower Huttenberg formation, covering 182 metres of reservoir section that includes 76 net metres of identified hydrocarbon pay. Each zone is expected to take about 10 days to test, which puts the company’s next scheduled update at roughly late August.
Brian Reinsborough, ReconAfrica’s President and CEO, framed the Elandshoek result as validation of a longstanding thesis about the geology beneath the Kavango basin. He noted that the naturally fractured carbonate rock in the formation appears capable of supporting flow, and said the operations team is now studying whether a horizontal or deviated sidetrack from the existing wellbore could intersect a larger stretch of that fracture network. He pointed to comparable fractured carbonate reservoirs elsewhere in the world, where horizontal and deviated wells have shown notably higher productivity than vertical ones drilled into the same rock.
The engineering detail matters here. The entire Otavi section of the well, all 1,657 metres of it spanning both the Huttenberg and Elandshoek formations, was cased and cemented, which lets the company isolate and test each of the six identified zones one at a time. That approach is useful for gathering clean data on individual zones, but casing can also limit access to the natural fractures that carbonate reservoirs like this one depend on for flow. Management has said it believes the Huttenberg formation carries enough matrix porosity, a measure of the rock’s own storage capacity, that it should produce reasonably well even without a sidetrack.
Roughly eight litres of hydrocarbon samples were collected from the flow tests and packed into IsoTubes for shipment to laboratories in the United States, where compositional analysis will determine how much of what came to surface was natural gas, associated liquids, or leftover fluid from the drilling process itself.
ReconAfrica operates the well alongside BW Energy Limited (OSE: BWE), which holds a 20% working interest, and the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia, a state-owned entity known as NAMCOR that holds a 10% carried interest. Beyond Namibia, the company holds licenses across roughly 13 million contiguous acres spanning the Kavango basin and Damara fold belt in Namibia, Angola, and Botswana, along with the Ngulu block offshore Gabon.
