Mauritania: Tullow shelves another well

Tullow Oil has quietly shelved another planned well offshore Mauritania as it shifts its focus to lower cost exploration in East Africa and Norway. Tullow had been planning a four-well programme offshore Mauritania, talking up the region’s range of geological plays, but the first well, Frégate, suffered technical problems and cost $200m, and, in February, Tullow announced a change of overall exploration strategy. Tullow somewhat unconvincingly described Frégate, which failed to find commercial hydrocarbons, as a “technical breakthrough”, opening a new oil play in the Late Cretaceous, but the company dropped the planned fourth well from its schedule, and its latest corporate presentation, published earlier this month, shows that it has now also pushed back the third.