Sao Tome, Jan. 16, 2026 (Lusa) - Oil companies Shell and Petrobras announced on Friday that they have not found commercially viable oil in Sao Tome and Príncipe, according to the results of drilling carried out last year, but they will continue their research and have asked for patience.
According to Shell's representative for Sao Tome and Príncipe, Andrew Hepburn, the results were not as expected in the Falcão well in Block 10, drilled in November and the deepest in the company's history, at around 3,000 metres.
‘Unfortunately, not. We found no commercial potential for oil, gas, or hydrocarbons in that well. But we know that there is an oil system. We just didn't find the right place,’ said Andrew Hepburn after a meeting with the Prime Minister of Sao Tome, Américo Ramos.
Andrew Hepburn said that the drilling was carried out ‘with operational success, using a lot of technology’ and ‘without any incidents and with a high level of safety,’ allowing more information to be gathered to ‘inform future decisions.’
‘The next steps for our partnership, Petrobras and ANP-STP [National Petroleum Agency of Sao Tome and Príncipe], is precisely to integrate this information [...] Although the result was not as expected, it provides a lot of valuable information (...) so that we can look at our models and see what happened,’ he stressed.
The Shell representative asked Sao Tome for patience, stressing that the EEZ of Sao Tome and Príncipe is an area ‘very untouched by drilling and oil exploration’, where ‘only two wells have been drilled in history’, compared to other countries that have ‘several hundred wells’.
He stressed that ‘exploration is a very long-term activity,’ emphasising that many countries had spent decades without finding oil and then found it in large quantities.
"So my message to the people of Sao Tome and Príncipe is to be patient. (...) It's a game that takes many years. We, as companies, are experts in patience, that is our job [...], we have to do our homework, inform and continue the fight," he said.
The company has promised to continue with studies in other blocks, namely 10, 11 and 13, in which it operates in partnership with Petrobras of Brazil.
‘The only way to find oil is to drill a hole. (...) We can do satellite studies, two-dimensional seismic surveys, three-dimensional seismic surveys, seabed sampling, but nothing can tell us whether there is oil,’ he explained.
This was the second oil drilling in the EEZ of Sao Tome and Príncipe.
In October 2022, the Galp and Shell consortium confirmed ‘the existence of an active oil system’ in the well called “Jaca”, in block six of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Sao Tome and Príncipe, but with no evidence that ‘it has a recoverable potential large enough to be commercial’.
JYAF/ADB // ADB.
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