BUY appoints ex-88 Energy COO - signs drilling support MoU

This week our oil exploration Investment Bounty Oil & Gas (ASX: BUY) appointed a new Chief Operating Officer, Rob Benkovic.

Rob was previously COO of 88 Energy, where he led frontier exploration in Alaska and supported the technical workings behind the Hickory-1 discovery.

We Invested in 88 Energy for many years over various drilling campaigns, so long term readers might be pretty familiar with that company.

BUY is acquiring the exclusive right to negotiate a Production Sharing Contract (PSC) over Block LB-32 offshore Liberia.

Before 88 Energy, Rob spent years at $22BN Apache on field development and reservoir engineering in Egypt, so he also has experience working in Africa which should come in handy for his work at BUY.

He joins BUY strategic advisor Dave Wall (formerly 88 Energy’s Managing Director - another 88 Energy connection), with the pair now supervising the interpretation of the existing 3D seismic over the LB-32 block.

This block hosts “never before drilled” deepwater "basin floor fan" targets, the same style of target that delivered $985BN Exxon's ~11 billion barrels in offshore Guyana, with ~$284BN TotalEnergies next door.

This week BUY also executed a MoU (memorandum of understanding) with AGR, covering well planning, drilling programme design and operational support.

AGR is an outsourced oil-and-gas technical and drilling team, that has managed 780 well projects globally.

BUY’s strategy here is to gain access to drilling capability without building a big internal team (the MoU doesn't commit BUY to any drilling or material spend).

BUY also confirmed PSC (Production Sharing Contract) terms are still being negotiated, with a further update "in due course".

Why we like BUY from a technical perspective

We did a pretty big deep dive on BUY’s Liberia asset in our initiation note, which you can read here.

The main reason we liked the deal BUY did for these blocks is because the way deepwater targets are being explored has changed a lot inside the last ~10-15 years.

None of the deepwater targets offshore in Liberia have ever been drilled.

Which we think is an opportunity - in a ‘post Guyana’ world.

Offshore Liberia (Africa) and offshore Guyana (South America) are known as ‘tectonic conjugate margins’.

Liberia and Guyana were directly connected as part of the supercontinent Gondwana until they began rifting and pulling apart between 120 and 100 million years ago.

The energy supermajors who flooded to offshore Guyana and delivered multi-billion barrel discoveries have now started piling into offshore Liberia (check out the map of who is exploring below).

The ultra deep water targets called “basin floor fan” plays were what delivered Exxon's ~11 billion barrels in discoveries offshore in Guyana.

Now, ultra-deep water targets are where most of the supermajors are focusing their offshore exploration around - on the hunt for the next Guyana mega discovery.

~$280BN energy supermajor TotalEnergies, which took 65% of the three blocks immediately west of the block BUY may end up owning, is going after those deep water “basin floor fan” targets.

Here is a visual summary of the basin floor fan concept AND why we care about them:

(source)

Interest in these types of targets has developed quick.

Here is what the offshore oil and gas scene looked like in Liberia back in 2024:

(source)

And here is what it looks like now, just two years later:

(source)

The majors look like they are thinking in a similar way to each other.

We came across this schematic a couple of weeks ago ‘Deepwater is the new frontier’:

(source)

What do we want to see BUY deliver next?

🔄 Complete the offshore Liberia acquisition

We want to see BUY complete the acquisition of the offshore Liberia block.

Here are the conditions BUY needs to meet to get the deal done:

(source)

🔄 Define a prospective resource based on 3D/2D seismic data

We want to see BUY put together a prospective resource estimate on its block based on 3D/2D seismic data (instead of personal gut feel from the vendor’s geo team).

We think that will be when the market really starts to get a better understanding of the project.

Here are the milestones we are tracking:

• ✅ Licence the 3D and 2D datasets (licensed today)
• 🔲 Reprocessing complete
• 🔲 Seismic data results
• 🔲 Targets confirmed (Zeus and Jupiter)

🔄Production Sharing Contract

We want to see BUY convert its “Letter of engagement” over its Liberian block into a Production Sharing Contract