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Qatar Petroleum (QP) has further expanded its African holdings, acquiring stakes from Total in deep-water blocks 2912 and 2913B in the Orange Basin. The French major plans a well next year on Block 2913B. Total said it would transfer to QP a 30% interest in Block 2913B and retain 40%, and also hand over 28.33% in Block 2912, retaining 37.78%.

Total and its partners are gearing up to drill the Venus-1 well on Block 2912 in late 2019 or early 2020, hoping for a second discovery to follow the Brulpadda gas condensate find drilled offshore South Africa early this year.“This is a massive submarine fan, it’s the biggest one any of us have ever seen. It’s about 600km2,” Africa Oil Corporation president and chief executive Keith Hill told the Africa E&P conference in London on 22 May.

Namibia is pushing ahead with plans to secure NamPower amid competition from distributed power providers and reduce reliance on imports, which currently account for around half of power consumption. In early May, the Ministry of Mines and Energy published its Electricity Supply Industry Market Framework, a new market structure allowing independent power producers (IPPs) to sell directly to large customers. The framework was approved by cabinet in mid-April and the Electricity Control Board (ECB) is drawing up rules which will come into effect on 1 September.

Glass manufacturer Groot Glass intends to seek an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor to build, finance, own and operate an 80MW solar photovoltaic (PV) plant in Tses in the Karas region of southern Namibia. The company named Germany-based Suntrace in early May as technical consultant for the project, which is designed to generate cost-effective electricity for the company’s five planned manufacturing factories, with surplus power to be sold to the national grid.

ExxonMobil has expanded its presence in the Walvis Basin by signing agreements for four new blocks adjacent to the maritime border with Angola. The company announced on 24 April that it had signed an agreement with the government and the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia (Namcor) for blocks 1710 and 1810, and farm-in agreements with Namcor for blocks 1711 and 1811A.The blocks extend from the shoreline to about 215km offshore in water depths of up to 4,000 metres.

Impact Oil & Gas has added to its acreage offshore Namibia, where Total is preparing to drill the Venus well on Block 2913B in the Orange Basin this year. Impact, which has 20% in Block 2913B, announced on 8 February that it had farmed into the adjacent Total-operated Block 2912, taking 18.89%. Impact also has the Orange Deep technical cooperation permit in deep water offshore South Africa.

South African advisory and private equity company Evolution Africa has confirmed to African Energy that four solar photovoltaic plants being built by its portfolio company Manna Renewables in Namibia came online in December. Two of the projects, in Kokerboom and Mariental, both 10MW, were initially developed by Israeli company GreeNam, which began developing the projects on a bilateral basis in 2008 before eventually signing a power purchase agreement with NamPower in July 2016.

Namibian-owned commercial bank Bank Windhoek issued its first green bond on 5 December on the Namibia Stock Exchange. According to Bank Windhoek, this makes it the first commercial bank in Southern Africa to issue green bonds, an instrument that has become a major source of funds for climate-related projects globally. In November alone, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) raised $3.5bn from seven bond listings, the most of any stock exchange that month, bringing the total raised by the LSE to $20.2bn since the green bond segment was launched in July 2015.

Tower Resources has signed a new petroleum agreement for an 80% operated interest in three offshore blocks in the northern Walvis Basin. The agreement covers blocks 1910A, 1911 and 1912B, and the balance will be held by National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia (Namcor) with 10% and local partner ZM Fourteen Investment CC with the remaining 10%. Blocks 1910A and 1911 formed part of Tower’s original licence PEL0010, which Tower and its partners Repsol and Arcadia relinquished in 2015.

Italy’s Salini Impregilo has announced the completion of the Neckartal multipurpose dam on the Fish River near Keetmanshoop in southern Namibia. The 80-metre-high curved gravity roller-compacted concrete dam, with a crest length of approximately 518 metres, is now the country’s largest dam, with a storage capacity almost three times that of the Hardap dam, the next largest, which is located upstream close to Mariental in the Hardap region.

Chariot Oil & Gas has announced that the Prospect S well on PEL 71 in the Walvis Basin did not encounter hydrocarbons. Chariot said the well was drilled to a total measured depth of 4,165 metres to test the stacked targets in Prospect S. The well penetrated the anticipated turbidite reservoir sands, in line with the pre-drill prognosis, but the reservoirs were water-bearing.

Oil and gas explorer Africa New Energies (ANE) is preparing to begin fundraising for a ten-well drilling project onshore Namibia through the issuance of asset-backed crypto-tokens. The company has owned two onshore blocks totalling 22,000km2 in Namibia through its subsidiary Alumni Exploration East Namibia Ltd since December 2012, when the company was founded by South Africans Steven Larkin and Brendon Raw. ANE has been using unconventional exploration techniques based on machine learning to identify drilling sites, in theory at a fraction of the cost of conventional 2D and 3D seismic programmes.

Tullow Oil has announced that the Cormorant-1 well on PEL 37 in the Walvis Basin failed to find commercial hydrocarbons. The well was drilled to 3,855 metres and tested an Early Cretaceous age submarine fan structure, but the sandstones it encountered were water-bearing. Tullow said the well encountered wet gas signatures in the overlying shale section, indicating a working oil system in the area. The well will be plugged and abandoned, and the Ocean Rig Poseidon drillship will move to PEL 71 to drill a well on Prospect S for Chariot Oil & Gas.

The 5MW Outapi solar project in the northern Omusati region began operating on 1 July, local impact investor and project founder Camelthorn Business Ventures told African Energy. The project has been under development since 2012 and was selected by NamPower in 2015 as one of 14 preferred bidders in the country’s interim renewable energy feed-in tariff programme

German solar developer SunEQ announced on 18 June that it has reached financial close with the Development Bank of Namibia for a 5MW solar PV project at the Ohorongo Cement factory in the Otjozondjupa region. The plant will comprise approximately 20,000 crystalline silicon modules mounted on single-axis trackers and the developer says it will be the first utility-scale project in Namibia to generate solar power for industrial use.