Reconnaissance Energy Africa Ltd (TSX-V:RECO, OTCQX:RECAF) CEO Brian Reinsborough talked with Proactive about the company’s preparations to drill Prospect I—its largest and most promising target to date.
Proactive: All right, welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Brian Reinsborough. He is the CEO of Recon Africa—Reconnaissance Energy Africa, if you like. You answer to both, I know. Brian, how are you?
Brian Reinsborough: I'm doing wonderful. Thanks for having me once again.
Yeah. So the company had a really interesting news release talking about Prospect I. So, let's remind everyone a little bit about what we're talking about here. And very important one for the company.
It is. We're really excited about this prospect. This is a follow-on to the well we drilled late last year at Naingopo, where we found some oil. That was the first well in this new full well plan. We were quite excited about what we found at Naingopo, and in fact, we changed our drilling schedule around because of it and teed up Prospect I.
Things are going really well. Just for context, this is the company’s largest prospect we've ever drilled. The resources from external auditors are around 360 million barrels. We think it’s probably a little bit larger than that. But also, I want to emphasize we like the risk profile of this because of what we found in the previous well. We're getting ready to tee it up. This will be one of the most attractive, largest onshore wells being drilled globally. So a lot of eyes are on this prospect. The team’s doing really well. It's on schedule to spud in the very late part of June. We're super excited about this big milestone for the company.
And Brian, for people that understand, there’s some preconstruction going on—a lot of work that has to get done before that happens. So maybe you can explain what has to happen before you get to that key part, obviously, of spudding it.
There’s a big lead time to actually spud that well, and people don't realize it takes time to do some of these things. We have a really strong stakeholder engagement program in the company. We work very closely with the local people and community—just getting land access. All that’s been done a few months ago.
Then you have to go through permitting. We got all our permits in place, largely. This location is about 10 kilometers off the main highway in northern Namibia. So we have to build a 10-kilometer road. That means we have to have crews out there debushing the whole area.
Then we have what's called the mine. That area’s never had any explosives, but it's part of the protocol. So there will be a couple of teams out there that will walk the track of the road and do the demining. Then we actually have to construct the road itself and the drill pads. We’re just embarking on those last two steps right now. But all the permits are in place, we're in a good location, and we're super excited to get this big milestone going for the company.
And lastly, Brian, I just want to sort of reiterate what you said a bit earlier about the potential size of this. Because in the news release, you talk about maybe 365 million barrels of unrisked, 32 million barrels of risked. I think the sheer scope of this will surprise a lot of people—just how big this has the potential to be.
It is. We like it. This is a very clean looking prospect. It's our best looking prospect, seismically active. For context, this structure is about 25 kilometers long, about five kilometers wide, and about 1,000 meters higher. So that's the dimension of the prospect we're going after—very material. But I also want to emphasize that this is an open-ended play. We have an inventory of 15 or 16 leads behind this one. So I like what we're doing here. If we set this off in the right trajectory, it’s a huge catalyst for changing the country, and also the company. And I do believe if we find oil here, we will be the first oil produced by Namibia. That's my goal.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style