TotalEnergies has been given the environmental go-ahead by South Africa’s government to start a wildcatting campaign next year in the Orange basin, a geological play that extends into Namibia where billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas have been discovered in the past 18 months.
This green light for the Deep Water Orange Basin (DWOB) licence came just one month after Pretoria largely threw out appeals against an earlier environmental authorisation that had been granted to the French supermajor to drill up to five exploration wells is Block 5/6/7 in the frontier Cape basin offshore Cape Town.