Striving to enhance oil and production, Angola has several major developments underway.
Angola's 2025 licensing round is expected to be launched at the end of November 2025, offering several blocks in the offshore Kwanza and Benguela basins. Speaking at the Wider African Energy Summit in Aberdeen – hosted in partnership with the African Energy Chamber – Matt Tyrrell, Vice President: Business Development at TROIS Geoconsulting, shared insight into some of these block opportunities, as well as advancements at the Kaminho and New Gas Consortium (NGC) projects.
Forming part of Angola's multi-year licensing round, the upcoming bid round aligns with efforts by the country to bolster production through new developments. The bid round will feature several promising assets, including Block 37. The block features the Omosi well, discovered in 2015 and offering significant development prospects.
“Omosi is another opportunity in Block 37 and is available in the upcoming licensing round. Drilled by ConocoPhillips, the Omosi-1 well unlocked a good reservoir with 2 trillion cubic feet (tcf) in place. There is enormous potential within this block, with six to seven pre-salt structures in the block. There is potential for up to 10 tcf of gas if all these pre-salt structures are charged,” stated Tyrrell.
Beyond the 2025 bid round, Angola is spearheading several major offshore oil and gas developments. These include the Kaminho project, featuring the Cameia and Golfinho fields, which is on track for production in 2028. Situated in Block 20 and operated by TotalEnergies, the project features “massive pre-salt structures,” according to Tyrrell, and is also home to the Orca discovery – previously known as the Baleia well.
Angola is also nearing first production for its NGC project, with operations set to start in Q1, 2026. Developed by the NGC consortium, the project is “the fourth biggest gas development in Africa. The project is being developed at a cost of $4 billion project and targets 141 billion cubic feet per year.”
Supporting the NGC development – ??among other projects – TROIS Geoconsulting launched an extensive data acquisition and reprocessing program to improve the geological understanding of the project. TROIS Geoconsulting's campaign included the launch of a new airborne AGG gravity acquisition, featuring 8,920 km² with 500 m line spacing; a reprocessed onshore 2D seismic data set; reprocessed well data; and a recovered or reprocessed 3D seismic data set.
Tyrrell said that “the data acquisition campaign for the NGC took six years to complete, with the final part featuring the reprocessing of the 1970s data sets.”
The program follows a series of presidential decrees enabling international operators to develop gas resources. Most notably, the country implemented Presidential Legislative Decree No. 7/18 of May 18, 2018, which established the first specific legal and fiscal regime for natural gas development.