Too early to know, says Petroleum Authority as offshore well passes a third of its depth

MOGADISHU (SONNA): It is too early to say whether there are indications of oil or gas from the offshore well being drilled in Somali waters, the Director General of the Somali Petroleum Authority, Eng. Abdulkadir Adan, has said.

Asked about the technical difficulties encountered so far and whether any signs had emerged, he said the work is still at the drilling stage. The well has passed through the water column and 1,300 metres below the seabed, with around 4,000 metres to be drilled below the seabed in total, which places the operation at roughly a third of that distance.

He described the sequence of work. The drilling is divided into seven sections, and the fourth is now under way. At each stage the casing is withdrawn, the bore widened and a new casing set in its place. The operation is currently moving from 18 inch casing to 16 inch, and the earlier string was being pulled out over the past two days.

On the schedule, the Director General said October had been set as the target for completing the drilling, but that the crews aboard now expect to finish by the end of September. He said the work is proceeding as intended and at pace, and that there have been no accidents. Between 470 and 480 crew are aboard the vessels, around 20 percent of them Turkish and the remainder from other countries. Daily safety checks are carried out, and pressure and ground temperature are monitored throughout.

He said the seas are currently rough, with conditions unsettled at the surface and below it, and that equipment is being installed in those conditions.

The well is Curad-1, in Block 153, drilled by the Turkish Petroleum Corporation using its own drillship, the Çağrı Bey, which arrived off the Somali coast in April. It lies about 372 kilometres northeast of Mogadishu in the Mogadishu Basin, in water around 3,500 metres deep.

Those figures explain the depths involved. The water column is roughly 3,500 metres, the section being drilled below the seabed is around 4,000 metres, and the total depth of the well is therefore in the region of 7,500 metres. That places Curad-1 among the deepest offshore exploration wells attempted anywhere, and the drilling programme has been estimated at up to 288 days, which makes the timetable the Director General described a considerable acceleration on that estimate.

The site was chosen after a seismic survey by the Turkish research vessel Oruç Reis, which spent 234 days off the Somali coast collecting three dimensional data across some 4,464 square kilometres in three offshore blocks between October 2024 and June 2025.

What is at stake is the first serious test of assumptions that have stood for decades. Somalia’s offshore has been surveyed and speculated about far more than it has been drilled. Only eight wells have been drilled in the country historically, of which two were in the Somali Basin, and none has produced a commercial discovery. Curad-1 is the first well drilled in Somali waters using modern deepwater technology, and the first that can confirm or disprove what the seismic data suggests.

The Director General’s answer is the appropriate one at this stage, and it is worth holding onto. Completing a well is not the same as finding anything in it. Drilling to total depth establishes what is there, and the answer may be nothing. Exploration wells in frontier basins fail more often than they succeed, which is why the terms on which they are drilled are written the way they are.

Under the agreement between Somalia and Türkiye, the Turkish Petroleum Corporation may recover up to 90 percent of production after royalties, which are capped at 5 percent, with several bonuses and administrative charges waived. Somalia is accepting lower early revenues in exchange for a partner willing to carry the exploration risk, which is the trade a country with no proven reserves and no drilling history is generally required to make.

The answer to the question everyone is asking will come when the well reaches total depth, and not before. On the Director General’s account that is now expected around the end of next month.