Drake Lawhead, VP of The Oil Council, interviews Nick Cooper of Ophir Energy (LON:OPHR) in December's issue of Drillers and Dealers. Ophir is an international oil and gas exploration company with an extensive portfolio of interests spread across the continent of Africa.
DL: It’s been a busy year – In the last five months, you took over the helm at Ophir from Salamander, floated on the London Stock Exchange, and acquired Dominion Petroleum. What next for an encore – or are you going to take a break?
NC: Ha ha, certainly not. The business is about to swing back into the exploration programme with 9 to 13 wells in the next 15 months, starting in Tanzania with a well spudded before year end. Having IPO’d in July we have a responsibility to shareholders to really keep up the pace in the Company and I am looking forward to a busy 2012.
Africa has several different exploration plays, most of which Ophir seem to have a stake in. Where do you see most market activity/excitement currently and where do you see most activity focussing on in the years to come?
We are balanced in our attention to the portfolio; we have a pan African collection of licences in all but one of the major oil and gas plays, each with its own defining factors and upside potential. Tanzania is the most obvious upside, but Equatorial Guinea provides considerable value from a near term commercialisation point of view and our highly prospective acreage in Gabon is technically exciting.
How long before we see another ‘Jubilee-sized’ discovery in Africa? Where might it come from?
Not long I wouldn’t have thought. However we should probably distinguish between oil and gas discoveries. ENI has just found 22.5 TCF gas offshore Mozambique, which combined with our volume of gas in Tanzania and that found by the Anadarko partnership could create a huge opportunity for the East African region. The pre-salt plays in Gabon and Namibia are also providing a lot of excitement to the industry, and if pre-drill estimates are to be believed they could be world scale discoveries in the event of success.
How would you describe the risk/reward profile of the plays you are involved in? Are you hunting elephants or smaller game?
We have a fairly balanced portfolio in…
