The explorations carried out so far in the Atlantic waters of southern Morocco have not yet yielded results, as clarified this Friday by the director of the National Office of Hydrocarbons and Mines (ONHYM) to the EFE agency.
"No oil has yet been discovered in Morocco," said the director of ONHYM, Amina Benjadra, in statements to the newspaper Le Matin, thus denying information published on March 6 by the Anglo-Turkish oil company Genel Energy.
The company announced in that statement the presence of oil reserves in the Atlantic waters of Morocco located between the cities of Tan-Tan and Tarfaya, facing the Canary Islands, the place where the greatest hopes had been placed so far.
Today, a statement from ONHYM, which directs all operations related to oil exploration, explains what seems to have been the misunderstanding.
ONHYM explains that the explorations carried out in the Upper Jurassic stratum at a marine depth of 2,112 meters in Tarfaya, in a deposit called Juby Maritime 1 (JM-1), have led to the discovery of a vein of "heavy oil" that is difficult to exploit compared to light oil.
In fact, the explorations carried out in the JM-1 deposit, located 38 kilometers from the Moroccan coast of Tarfaya, made it possible to find heavy oil at a depth of 3,490 meters, the ONHYM statement clarified, but added that this oil does not contain "good quality reserves."
These surveys began on January 8, 2014 and lasted two months, and were aimed at reaching a final depth of 3,835 meters, the note said.
The licenses for the exploration of the Juby Maritima deposit, with a total area of 4,481.3 square kilometers, were granted to ONHYM's partners, the Scottish CAIRN Energy and the Anglo-Turkish Genel Energy.
ONHYM is currently carrying out a program of oil exploration both offshore and on land, and a total of 27 explorations are planned for the year 2014.