The Gulf of Guinea is attracting oil companies in search of new deepwater discoveries. Liberia, which has long remained on the sidelines of major offshore finds, is now seeking to join this trend.
TotalEnergies and its Canadian partner BluEnergies are moving forward with their offshore oil exploration program off the coast of Liberia, aiming to identify the most promising locations for future drilling. On Monday, July 6, the two companies released an update on their activities across three blocks in the deepwater Harper Basin, according to a statement from BluEnergies.
The exploration program is based on three complementary operations. The first involves the reprocessing of 6,167 square kilometers of seismic data originally acquired in 2013. This work has been entrusted to Norwegian company TGS and is now more than 50% complete.
The second operation, carried out by GeoPartners, consists of seabed mapping across an area of 4,045 square kilometers at water depths ranging from 500 to 3,500 meters. It is accompanied by a third operation that measures the chemical composition of seabed sediments and subsurface heat flow in order to detect possible indicators of hydrocarbon accumulations.
These offshore blocks are being explored under an agreement signed in January 2026. TotalEnergies is the operator with a 65% working interest, while BluEnergies holds the remaining 35%, according to a statement released by the Canadian company in January.
Liberia currently imports all of its petroleum products and has never made a commercially viable oil discovery. The country's exploration history spans more than 70 years and has been marked by a series of unsuccessful drilling campaigns dating back to the 1960s. In 2016, ExxonMobil drilled the Mesurado-1 well, but the results were not commercially significant.
Against this backdrop, the Harper Basin has emerged as a promising exploration frontier. According to Sergio Laura, Vice President of Exploration at BluEnergies, the basin forms part of the West Africa Transform Margin, the same geological province that hosts Ghana's Jubilee oil field, Namibia's Venus discovery, and the recent offshore oil discoveries in Côte d'Ivoire.