The Moroccan Atlantic coast off Agadir is full of significant reserves of this precious black gold that is oil. Recently, on April 13, 2022, the British oil and gas exploration company, Europa Oil & Gas, which benefits from the Inezgane offshore permit located off Agadir, announced that it had identified a significant volume of recoverable resources. risk-free, exceeding 1 billion barrels (oil equivalent), in the top five classified prospects only.
The National Hydrocarbons and Mines Office (ONHYM) confirmed and added that several others were even estimated at 2 billion barrels. Europa Oil & Gas has published its interim results of the exploration process for the six-month period ending January 31, 2022. Which indicated that Inezgane represents a high-impact exploration opportunity in this region of the world. This potential of one billion barrels discovered in Morocco offshore Agadir under the drilling license, called Inezgane Offshore, had been granted in September 2019 and the drilling and officially started last August.
On this field, adds the document, which covers an area of 11,228 square kilometers, the company owns 75% of the exploitation, and the rest is in the possession of ONHYM (25%). Europa Oil & Gas adds that the recent assessment reveals a “large volume of values recoverable without risk 1 billion barrels of fuel “. Morocco has not yet officially commented on the announcement of the British company which, on its website, places the exploration at a depth of 600 to 2,000 kilometers in the Agadir basin. Last week, Amina Benkhadra, director general of ONHYM, before the House of Representatives gave an overview of the country’s exploration activities and said that between 2000 and 2022, Morocco had drilled 67 wells, of which 40 were tested positive for oil or gas.
Seven of these 67 wells were drilled in the waters off the coast between Agadir and Tarfaya, including three in shallow water and four in deep water. Five of them (two in the area of Tarfaya and Ifni, near the Canary Islands) were found to contain oil or traces of oil. The discovery of this treasure of black gold under the sea, one imagines it makes people envious and some even argue that the billion barrels of crude oil from the Inezgane offshore would represent the equivalent of Moroccan GDP (112 .9 billion dollars in 2020, according to the World Bank).
In addition, in the Tarfaya region, the Italian company ENI has explored 23,900 square kilometers of our waters up to 1,000 meters deep, authorized in this since 2017 (Reported by Qatar Petroleum in 2019), by ONHYM in near the towns of Sidi Ifni, Tan Tan and Tarfaya. The prospecting of seven offshore wells was carried out during these two decades, three of which were in shallow waters. Of these three, two revealed the presence of oil, including heavy oil near Tarfaya and another light oil near Ifni, whose coasts are close to the islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura in the Canary archipelago.
This observation, added to that of the British company Europa Oil & Gas in the region of Agadir and Hunt Oil (Chariot Oil & Gas), which will be responsible for drilling a well in Mogador, is causing talk in the neighboring islands under the pretext that the territorial waters with Spain have not yet been negotiated. Europa Oil & Gas has been drilling Moroccan waters since the Moroccan government granted it permission to do so at the end of 2019 and with a license to explore this basin for 25 years and a 75% stake.
In this sense, the President of the Canary Islands, Angel Victor Torres, assured this Wednesday that Morocco has started oil prospecting in the waters under its jurisdiction which do not affect those of the Canary Islands. “The government of the Canary Islands categorically rejects any oil exploration in Canary waters. These surveys and studies of which we have become aware were authorized by Morocco months or years agohe told the media. Torres insisted that “these works are not carried out in Canarian waters and called for the respect of international legality and the existence of “absolute environmental security“.
But if this can reassure the government of the Canary Islands, Morocco does not only have these offshore prospects in sight. Indeed, the Kingdom is full of other potential hydrocarbon deposits. As a reminder, in a presentation last Wednesday before the Committee on Infrastructure, Energy, Mines and the Environment in the House of Representatives, Amina Benkhadra, had underlined that the company SDX Energy will carry out the works of drilling of 13 wells in land areas south of Lalla Mimouna, western Gharb, Sebou and west of Moulay Bouchta, while Bell and Forpetro will drill two wells in Haha. For its part, Predator gas plans to drill 3 wells, while Sound Energy will drill 5 wells in Anoual, Grand Tendrara and Sid L’Mokhtar, just as it has obtained operating authorization from Tendrara and construction of a small liquefied natural gas station.
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