UK-based Tudor Hall Energy (THE) announced on September 19 that it had agreed to work with Nigeria’s Innoson Oil & Gas (IOG) to facilitate the sale of a stake in SL2020A, an exploration licence offshore Sierra Leone.

In a statement, THE said it would assist IOG, which is currently the only shareholder in SL2020A, in arranging and concluding a farm-out deal for the offshore block. “Together, the companies will stimulate renewed interest in this large tract of Atlantic transform margin exploration acreage, which includes an on-block discovery and new information developed by Innoson,” it said.

The Nigerian company is looking for a technical partner capable of pushing forward with a work programme at SL2020A, THE noted. The programme will cover seismic data acquisition, as well as exploration drilling, it said.

THE said that interest in Sierra Leone’s offshore zone was on the rise, owing to the fact that the area is a conjugate margin to the Guyana-Suriname basin on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. SL2020A has been modelled to be analogous to Guyana’s portion of that basin, which is known to contain billions of barrels of oil equivalent (boe), the British company stated.

Phillip Slater, THE’s managing director, commented: “We are excited to secure this new commission to work with IOG, and the timing is just right. The huge success in recent years in Guyana is guiding our thinking and has stimulated the resurgence of interest in Sierra Leone and adjacent basins.”

SL2020A is IOG’s only upstream asset. The Nigeria company has identified several leads at the block through a combination of initial remote sensing, evaluation of material from multiple sources and analysis and interpretation of seismic data. “The latter substantiated a system supporting several leads, eliciting a Ryder Scott Company’ P50 CPR [competent persons report] of the likely occurrence of 8.2 trillion cubic feet [232.2bn cubic metres] and 234mn barrels of recoverable [natural] gas and condensate resource,” IOG said on its website.

The Nigerian company’s website lists THE as IOG’s asset manager.