Morocco has found heavy and light oil in two wells drilled off the coasts of Tarfaya and Ifni, near the Canary Islands, according to a report offered by the National Office of Hydrocarbons and Mines (ONHYM) of the North African country's prospecting between the years 2000 and 2022.
The general director of the Moroccan state company ONHYM, Amina Benkhadra, reported last week before the Moroccan Chamber of Representatives on the prospecting of 67 wells in that period by Morocco, of which 40 were positive for oil or gas.
According to the ONHYM presentation consulted by Efe, in the Tarfaya-Agadir area, the prospecting of seven wells in the sea has been carried out in these two decades, of which three in shallow waters.
Of those three, two revealed the presence of oil, one of them heavy oil near Tarfaya and another of light oil near Ifni, whose coasts are located near the islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.
As for the other four wells, it indicated that they have been drilled in deep waters and three of them have revealed indications of the presence of oil and gas.
Benkhara did not detail before the Chamber of Representatives when these surveys have taken place, but framed them in the general balance of the last two decades. Consulted this Wednesday by Efe, the ONHYM has not responded if those of Tarfaya and Ifni are new surveys.
These surveys are part of a contract signed in December 2017 between ONHYM and the Italian company ENI to search for hydrocarbons in waters up to 1,000 meters deep in the Atlantic strip of Tarfaya.
At that time, ENI reported that it was about searching for hydrocarbons in twelve grids in the area called "Tarfaya Offshore Shallow".
In principle, the possible benefits of the exploitation were divided into 75% for ENI and 25% for ONHYM, but in 2019 the company Qatar Petroleum entered the contract, acquiring 30%.
It is a maritime area of 23,900 km2 located off the Moroccan coasts of Sidi Ifni, Tan Tan and Tarfaya, an area adjacent to the one that Repsol explored in 2014 with a Spanish license, off the islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.
In recent years, both Morocco and Spain (from the waters located off the Canary Islands) have carried out hydrocarbon prospecting on the Atlantic coast of the north of the African continent, but without finding commercial potential deposits to date.
