RE: Head scratcher:16 Apr 2024 15:18
Thanks to Malcy's Blog:
Borders & Southern
I wrote briefly about Borders & Southern recently, on 1st March Harry Baker took over as CEO and he kindly invited me in to meet the team and look at the maps and squiggly lines that I hadn’t seen for many years. I met with him, Finance Director Peter Fleming and Business Development Manager, Bruce Farrer.
There is clearly an enthusiasm at the company that I for one hadn’t detected before, the company has three production licences in the Southern Falklands Basin, 100% owned and the operator. Readers will know that fiscal terms locally are favourable with a 9% Royalty and CT of 26%.
There have been both 2D and 3D seismic operations completed and a drilling campaign which discovered the Darwin field with its first well. Darwin is a 3.2 tcf wet gas discovery with, two adjacent tilted fault blocks, Darwin East and Darwin West which have an un-risked best estimate of wet gas initially in-place for the combined area of 3.2 TCF and for gross Contingent and Prospective Resource of 462 million barrels of liquids (condensate & LPGs).
Most importantly, the significant amount of liquids makes the discovery economic at current economics in its own right and with near field prospectivity there is very decent upside. I get the impression that the primary move for Harry Baker as incoming CEO is to monetise this discovery and with a data room open that option is route one.
But as he said to me in our meeting ‘funding is the key to unlocking this asset and there are very few projects around the world with its risk profile’. Indeed we both feel that with a great deal of under investment of late, partly created by ESG and a misread of fossil fuel demand, companies are competing for more, not less substantial opportunities worldwide to fill their hoppers.
This makes a number of things that might happen quite important to B&S, firstly there is the small matter of the Sea Lion project still underway in the nearby North Falkland Basin which is expected to get FID later this year, should that happen it would surely give the SFB a significant boost. Another positive is that there are plenty of rigs in the Namibia area for obvious reasons and that mobilisation from there is a simpler task than most.
Accordingly I feel that this is a brilliant opportunity for Baker to use his industry knowledge and perhaps more importantly his financial heavy lifting skills to develop this asset which is one of very few worldwide projects with the opportunity to make a difference.
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