Rhino next door - more summer action18 Jun 2025 05:53
Rhino moves fast to contract rig for next Namibia well
"Ambitious independent Rhino Resources is within weeks of spudding a third exploration well in Namibia's prolific Orange basin. The privately owned player is moving fast to deepen its understanding of highly prospective Petroleum Exploration Licence 85, where it recently unveiled two oil discoveries at its Sagittarius-1X and Capricornus-1X probes. Capricornus-1X was particularly significant, flowing at 11,000 barrels per day of oil during tests. In the market, there was a widely-held view that Rhino would take its time to further evaluate these discoveries and then drill an appraisal well on one of them, as a precursor to a potential development. However, the Cape Town-based company has instead decided to drill an exploration well on the Volans prospect and if this is a success, then it could jump to the front of the queue as a fast-track development candidate.
Rhino chief executive Travis Smithard told Upstream that the Volans-1X probe will be drilled by Northern Ocean's semi-submersible Deepsea Mira, which recently completed a Namibian campaign for TotalEnergies and is at anchor in Walvis Bay. He said the probe is currently expected to spud between the end of July and early August — with a bit of leeway in both months — and take between 52 and 55 days to drill. Smithard explained the rationale behind this unexpected move and the potential held out by Volans. “Because we've got very good calibration on our seismic between Capricornus and Volans, it really behoves us to investigate what Volans may be.”
The original plan by the partners — which include Azule Energy and Namcor — was to drill Sagittarius and Volans. Smithard described Sagittarius as “an absolute no-brainer” with what “looked like very clear, stacked reservoir systems that were lighting up and giving you amplitude-versus-offset responses; that's effectively what we found — stacked intervals with hydrocarbon.” The decision to test Capricornus and not Volans next was, he said, “an on-the-fly decision supported by the joint venture,” noting that Capricornus is “quite different, slightly older and in a different trend.” Elaborating on Volans, Smithard said: “Its morphology seems a bit more sheet-like, potentially. And if that's the case, then from a development perspective, it may be even easier (to exploit) than something like Capricornus” which itself “looks quite easy” from a morphological perspective. “We want to test Volans because there is potential for that to be our fast-track development option, rather than tying ourselves to the first thing that we find,” said Smithard.
Completed in February 2025, Sagittarius-1X found hydrocarbons, while Capricornus-1X — which wrapped up in April and lies wholly within PEL 85 — tested 11,000 bpd of oil, a volume that was “corrected” to account for the water, nitrogen and other gases flowing from the wellstream. While TotalEne
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