Far to raise KES 700 million for offshore Kenya exploration

Australian explorer FAR Ltd has announced an equity raising placement which is expected to raise $8 million before expenses.

The placement is being undertaken to fund further exploration in offshore Kenya potentially including accelerating the evaluation of the Miocene reef oil play offshore Kenya in which the company has a significant acreage position and for general working capital purposes.

Far says the equity raising will include a placement of a total of 200,000,000 new ordinary shares in the Company to raise the amount.

“FAR is pleased to have raised money to allow the company to move forward our key position in Kenya in the short term. Building our portfolio of opportunities for our shareholders is key to our strategy and we aim to deliver a high impact drilling program in Kenya following on from the current drilling program offshore Senegal,” says FAR’s Managing Director, Ms Cath Norman.

FAR has a 60% equity position and operates block L6 and a 30% equity position in the L9 block both of which are located in the highly prospective East African margin in the Lamu Basin, Kenya.

Block L9 is north of recent, world scale, natural gas discoveries totalling around 100 trillion cubic feet off the coasts of Mozambique and Tanzania.

In 2012, FAR completed a 778km squared of 3D seismic survey over the L6 permit offshore Kenya a survey conducted by Fugro Geoteam.

FAR says using data from 3D sesmic it has identified three prospects (Tembo, Kifaru and Kifaru West) which have prospective resources of 327, 178 and 130 million barrels of oil (un-risked best estimate, 100% basis) respectively, or in a gas only success case, 807, 517 and 388 billion cubic feet of gas. The chances of a discovery of the three prospects have been assessed to be 21%, 19% and 18% respectively.

With a current licence area of 3,134km2, the L6 permit has both onshore and offshore potential with water depths varying from shallow transition zones to approximately 400m.