Tullow Moving Out of Ethiopia

Tullow Oil, the British oil company exploring for oil in the South Omo basin, decided to move its staff as well as equipments out of Ethiopia.

During a consultative meeting organized by Ethiopian Ministry of Mines and World Bank, Tullow’s Country Manager, Nick Woodal-Mason, disclosed his company is taking its staff and mining equipment out of Ethiopia. Tuullow has already released the well drilling rig.

Woodal-Mason noted, “After drilling four wild cat wells in the South Omo basin we found nothing. We found only clay. Geologically, the results are a nightmare.”

“We came here after we discovered oil reserves in Uganda and Kenya. We got positive results in the Great East Africa Rift Valley. The rift system extends to Ethiopia. Our blocks are found in South Omo near the Kenyan border where we found hundreds of millions of barrels of oil. The decision to come to Ethiopia was good but it did not work out,” Woodal-Mason explained how his company decided to come to Ethiopia.

The Country Manager stated there are only five expatriates from Tullow’s Ethiopian office, 35 of them have already left. The five expatriates left are expected to deal with logistics and customs issues. He furthered everyone is scheduled to leave the nation by December and the company will only have a skeleton office for the coming two years.

Woodal-Mason also made explanations about the complexity f the oil exploration project in South Omo. He noted, “The concession is found in one of the remotest places not only in Ethiopia but in Africa. It is located 1600km south-west of the port of Djibouti. It takes ten days for a truck to reach the concession from Galafi, the Ethio-Djibouti border, to our camp. It costs us 10,000 USD per truck for a one-way trip. This makes our exploration work very expensive,” Woodal-Mason said.

Tullow is going to give all the petroleum data it has gathered from south Omo and Chew Bahir to the Ministry of Mines, According to the Country Manager. He furthered they are not going to do any extra work in the coming two years until their agreement is expires, claiming they have done what they have initially agreed for.

According to The Reporter Tullow’s experts are recalibrating the basin based on the data collected from the wells. Talking about this Woodal-Mason said, “There is evidence of source rocks in the wells. That is not to mean that they do not exist in the kitchen”. “We could not find the source rock.”

Nonetheless, he added, the subsurface data required from wells has been obtained. Worldwide statistics of success rate ratio in drilling wild cat exploration wells dictates it is one out of 11. “Unfortunately, our wells were some of the ten failures,” Woodal-Mason said. We are leaving behind the roads and bridges we built and the local persons we trained,” he added.

According to The Reporter, Tullow oil spent U.S. $ 250 Million in the South Omo oil exploration project.

Source: The Reporter