The Exploration History of East Africa

East Africa has emerged as one of the new and exciting petroleum provinces of the 21st Century. This success is, for the most part, a relatively recent event and comes after many decades of relatively unsuccessful exploration. This paper looks at the exploration play concepts that have both led and misled the search for oil and gas deposits in the region over those years by plotting wells and discoveries through time on a series of simple fairway maps. Understanding the exploration legacy of this region is shown to be key. Most discoveries had pointers towards them from early drilling in terms of discoveries that may have been uneconomic at that time, proven source rocks or columns which must have been charged from distant kitchens. Associated with this, the distribution of working trap types does not follow global paradigms. Fields in simple four way closures are rare in east Africa and instead we see a high stratigraphic or downthrown element in the offshore traps and largest onshore gas fields, and unusual fault sealed and downthrown traps in the EARS.