New Explorers
The IOC’s success has encouraged independent oil companies to venture farther offshore, prospecting for oil fields down-dip from discovered gas fields, in deeper water (3 km).
Mozambique LNG, Comoros Oil Frontier
Since The Comoros Republic published its new petroleum law in in 2012, new players have included Bahari Resources, Discover Exploration, Western Energy, Tullow and in 2025, Colossal Energy Fields.
A new era of seismic surveying began in Comoros, with new 2D seismic data acquired in 2014 that tied to 20,000 line-km of Ion’s regional SPAN surveys shot in 2011 in East Africa over and surrounding giant discoveries.
The bar was further raised when credentialed explorer Tullow Oil joined the hunt, following previous successes in Uganda, Ghana, and Kenya in Africa and in Guyana and Suriname in South America. Tullow acquired a new seismic 3D survey in 2019 in parts of their Comoros licenses. Tullow's executive vice president of new ventures, Ian Cloke, said: “This is a massive frontier opportunity at all scales—whether it’s the Turbidite systems, whether it’s leads that we’ve got mapped,” Cloke said. “We’ve been evaluating many licenses up and down East Africa. This one passed our selection criteria.” He continued, “We believe there’s an oil kitchen out here, outboard of the gas.”*
This premier 3D survey in the Comoros was the first survey since ION’s pioneering regional SPAN surveys in 2011 and the 2014 infill. Two partly stacked prospects in Comoros blocks 35, 36 and 37 together contain gross mean unrisked prospective resources of about 7.1 billion barrels of oil, according to an August 2018 Competent Persons Report conducted by ERCE, a U.K.-based independent energy consulting group. These built upon earlier 1980s vintage seismic reflection and refraction studies conducted aboard research vessels R/V Vema and Conrad of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory.