The Gabonese Ministry of Petroleum and Hydrocarbons has today appointed CGG as technical consultant to assist with the promotion of its 11th Licencing Round with focus on five deepwater blocks.

The round is to be opened for five months starting on the 27th of October 2015 and bids can be submitted from the 15th of February 2016 onwards and by no later than 31st of March 2016. Prequalification for the bid round will require the procurement of a minimum amount of seismic data.

The Minister for Petroleum and Hydrocarbons, Etienne Dieudonné Ngoubou, opened the round at the 22nd Africa Oil Week conference in Cape Town, South Africa.

The round is to be promoted by a series of road shows starting in Libreville on the 24th of November, then Paris on 26th November, Singapore on 30th November and Houston on the 3rd of December 2015 respectively.

CGG was appointed to advice Gabon on the licencing round, in response to the exploration challenges facing the country. It has worked directly with the Ministry to procure about 25,000km² of new 3D BroadSeisTM multi-client seismic data as part of an integrated geoscience program to support the round.

“Ever since we acquired our first geophysical survey in 1932, CGG has actively supported Gabon’s development of its natural resources. We are delighted to continue our fruitful cooperation with the Gabonese Republic by offering our expertise in geoscience to help promote the 11th Licensing Round. Given the high quality of the intermediate results we have seen so far from our recent BroadSeis survey, we expect the final results to be a significant resource for clients to de-risk this promising exploration arena. We are pleased to announce that several companies have already pre-committed to the dataset,” Jean-Georges Malcor, CEO of CGG told Energy-pedia.