Both blocks are subject to farm-in agreements between wholly owned Baraka subsidiary Baraka Mauritania Ventures Limited (BMV) and Woodside Mauritania Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Woodside Petroleum Limited (Woodside). Last year, Woodside farmed in for a 75% interest in the Taoudeni Basin PSC areas.

At the time of entering into a Production Sharing Contract (PSC) for these blocks, Baraka, through BMV, acquired a complete set of all available seismic data for the entire Taoudeni basin, an area straddling the Mauritanian and Malian border and covering about 1 million square kilometres.

“Reprocessing of these vintage data was not only a first-term PSC requirement in Blocks Ta11 and Ta12, but was also considered essential for maturing leads and prospects throughout the basin,” Baraka chief operating officer Dr Satyavan Reymond said.

“Having complete access to this reprocessed data provides Baraka with a great strategic advantage,” Reymond said.

“It allows for a complete review of old information with new information and therefore ensures that we can gain a modern understanding of the rock facies distribution in this largely unexplored basin that has considerable potential for oil and gas.

“The modern reprocessing of these historical data shows better than expected resolution of both stratigraphic and structural nature. This ties in well with similar work recently completed for Baraka on its Mali tenements.”

One of the reprocessed seismic lines runs through the ABOLAG-1 well drilled in 1974, which recorded encouraging gas shows of 480,000 cfd from the Infracambrian combined source rock and reservoir interval.

Baraka said these Infracambrian rocks were present throughout the basin as confirmed by the new data on the facies distribution maps produced by the Baraka team.

The reprocessing of the 1972-1973 data was carried out by FUGRO in Perth, under the supervision of Woodside.