Perhaps... our lucky 13, finally?

By the end of this year we should be in a better position to know whether we have finally struck oil as the Australian company Pancontinental and American Anadarko drill our 13th exploratory oil well in the sea to the south of our islands.

Since 1958 a number of Italian, American, French and Australian companies have been granted 23 licences for oil exploration: two onshore and the rest offshore. They drilled 12 wells. Six of them were dry. Two had oil shows. Another two had gas shows. Another two had oil and gas shows.

Our expectations and hopes of discovering oil and gas in commercial quantities have been raised on a number of occasions, especially on the eve of some general elections, only to be dashed later. So, understandably, we have become cynical whenever we hear that finally we have struck oil.

But perhaps this time we might end up celebrating with Chianti and Limoncello, the names given to the two leads in southern Maltese waters, where the Australian company Pancontinental, on the basis of the seismic survey carried out in September 2004, is very optimistic about discovering oil. In the company's annual report for 2005, president David Kennedy highlights the Malta project as positive for the company.

The 2005 report states: "The company has assessed the two largest Chianti and Limoncello leads to have unrisked speculative potential oil reserves of 450 and 960 million barrels respectively."

"Significant world class prospects"

Last june Pancontinental signed an agreement with Houston-based Anadarko to carry out a four-week seismic programme to determine the viability of Chianti and Limoncello which it is considering has "significant, world class prospects."

Equally optimistic about these prospects, Anadarko agreed to fund this programme covering an area of 1,385 km. The programme was meant to start last year but the Maltese government told the companies to suspend the programme for six months to try to resolve border issues we have with Tunisia and Libya.

We do not know yet whether any progress has been achieved with our two neighbours. In October 2003 then Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami had announced that Malta and Libya had agreed to co-operate on oil exploration. More than two years have passed since that announcement and nothing else has been heard on the subject.

It is good to know that Chianti and Limoncello are within undisputed Maltese waters and away from unresolved border areas. So eventually drilling can still start even if no agreement is reached with Libya and Tunisia. Once the new seismic survey to be carried out later on this year establishes the viability of Chianti and Limoncello, drilling can start as early as 2007.

Chianti and Limoncello are to be found in areas adjacent to major oil fields of Tunisia and Libya. Pancontinental's seismic survey, incorporating previous seismic data of the area and collecting new data concludes that Chianti and Limoncello have features and characteristics of the reservoirs of "the commercial oil fields next door." The nature of other features could not be determined as they extend into disputed waters and are the subject of Maltese-Tunisian border discussions.

But even the existing data are enough to establish that the features of Chianti and Limoncello are similar to the large oil and gas fields in neighbouring Libyan and Tunisian waters and also to the giant Libyan onshore oilfield of the Sirte basin. Chianti and Limoncello are also near the large producing oil fields of Isis of Tunisia (estimated to contain 400 million barrels) and Bouri of Libya (estimated to hold 1.5 billion barrels of oil).

So the prospects of finally striking oil look good but it is still too early to celebrate the discovery of over a billion barrels of oil in our southern waters. As we continue to look for oil and gas in the seas around us, we still need to work hard to revive our economy. Discovering oil will help us solve a number of our problems but will create new ones.

Is it too early to start thinking how to use the benefits of discovering oil, in the best possible way, to develop us, improve our quality of life and build a fairer and richer Malta and Gozo in the 21st century?

evaristbartolo@hotmail.com