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African Economy
Cameroons Thailand oil back drilling delay to end in 10th year
Cameroon’s
Cameroon’s near-decade-long wait for drilling in its Thali licence is set to end later this year, following the award of a rig contract by the operator, UK-listed exploration company Tower Resources.

Tower Resources said it has now awarded a contract for a rig to drill the NJOM-3 well in Thali to Saudi services company ADES, for one of the contractor’s 48 jack-up rigs. The NJOM-3 drilling is likely to be done using ADES’ 2019-build Admarine 510 jack-up rig, which is currently undergoing its five-yearly recertification in Bahrain.

In a pattern that has become familiar over the last nine years, Tower Resources said earlier this month that it submitted a fresh application to Cameroon for “the further extension of the current exploration period of the Thali licence”. But the government asked “to see the final rig selection completed so that they can see more clearly what extension may be required”. Cameroon granted Tower Resources a Thali licence production sharing contract (PSC) for a three-year exploration period in September 2015.

In securing an ADES jack-up rig, the UK-listed exploration company benefitted from an opportunity for lower rig mobilisation and demobilisation costs and the contractor’s market expansion drive. Tower Resources said the ADES’ jack-up rig first got a separate contract to drill in Cameroon in late 2025 from Addax Petroleum Cameroon, a subsidiary of China’s Sinopec in the country. The difficulty of coordinating timing with Addax Petroleum Cameroon was more than offset by the “favourable terms” that ADES offered. ADES has also been looking for opportunities to enter new markets since Saudi Aramco suspended contracts for its rigs in 2024.

Early in 2025, ADES secured an entry into neighbouring Nigeria when it got a rig contract from upstream operator Britannia-U, which aims to unlock new production of 25,000BOPD of oil and 23MMscfd of gas under a $283Million revised field development plan.

Tower Resources said it planned to drill the NJOM-3 well last year but financing activities did not align with the 2024 rig schedule offered by Norwegian rig contractor Borr. The company’s improved fortunes in 2025 follows a farm-out agreement with Pakistan’s Prime Global Energies that was announced at the beginning of this year, which secured $15Million of additional capital in exchange for a 42.5% Thali licence stake. Approval for the farm-out agreement, along with the application for an exploration period extension, awaits government approval.

The shallow-water Thali licence, in the Rio del Rey basin, was formerly part of the Dissoni oil block that was included in TOTALEnergies’ 2010 divestment of its Cameroonian assets to Anglo-French independent Perenco Energy. The Thali licence spans 119km2 that Perenco gave up after it started production from the Dissoni field, having selected the area it wanted covered by its production lease.

Rio del Rey is an eastern sub-basin of the Niger Delta and accounts for about 70% of Cameroon’s oil production. Tower Resources said it has successfully optimised the location and design of the NJOM-3 well based on 3D seismic data that it reprocessed using the AI-driven Paradise workbench software in 2023. The new location was chosen so that the well “encounters the thicker sections of the largest number of target reservoirs, while also minimising the exposure to potential gas caps in the reservoirs”.

Tower Resources said its base case plan after drilling NJOM-3 is to “test it and then suspend it”. But the company is also considering options to put the well on “longer term test and production” while preparing to drill additional production wells. A Thali licence valuation completed for Tower Resources by consultancy Oilfield International in 2020 projected that a first phase could target a best-estimate 12Million barrels of crude oil in recoverable reserves with four wells. Under the terms of the PSC, Tower Resources could operate a two-year extended production test, using a leased mobile offshore production unit and a shuttle tanker that will evacuate the production 25km to Cameroon’s Massongo floating storage and offloading (FSO) facility for export, according to Oilfield International.

Tower Resources’ NJOM-3 well is expected to be drilled before the ADES jack-up rig starts its work for Addax Petroleum Cameroon in Fourth Quarter (Q4) 2025.
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