On Sunday, April 21, the Portuguese oil company Galpenergia announced the completion of the first phase of exploration in the Mopan field near the coast of Namibia, and confirmed that it may contain at least 10 billion barrels of oil.

The company conducted several tests for the Mopane-1x well and the Mopane-2x well, and large columns of light oil were discovered in the two wells, which are 8 kilometers apart. The Mopane field is located in the Orange Basin along the coast of the country, which is located in southern Africa.

Galp indicated that the flows achieved during the tests reached the maximum permissible level of 14 thousand barrels per day, which makes Mopan an important commercial discovery, and hydroconeal estimates in the Mopan complex swallow about 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent or higher.

Galp owns an 80% stake in the exploration license covering an area of about 10,000 square kilometers in the Orange Basin, and Namibia could become a new source of income for the company, which currently has strong investments off the coast of Brazil.

The company is launching a process to attract investors for projects in Namibia, which is expected to reach a large scale. Namibia aims to obtain possible membership in the OPEC + alliance of oil producers, while determining what could become the fourth largest production in Africa by the next decade.