Basin in Focus: Cote d'Ivoire
A spike in recent exploration success has led to a new wave of investment offshore Côte d’Ivoire. The transform margin setting has resulted in an asymmetric basin structure, which has impacted depositional trends, resulting in a series of structural and stratigraphic traps providing a range of exploration opportunities.
The Bubale West-1X follows Murphy’s Bubale-1X, which discovered light oil within a Turonian sandstone reservoir, and serves as an appraisal well to test the extent and connectivity of the reservoir.
The Exploration Story:
This Turonian channel-turbidite complex has been targeted by several nearby wells, including the Paon wells to the north of Bubale-1X and Bubale West-1X and the Rossignol-1X well to the south. Paon-1 well encountered 31m net pay of light oil in Turonian sands, with appraisal wells estimating recoverable reserves to be 85mmbbl. Rossignol-1X found 5m net oil pay in well-developed Turonian sands with a sub-commercial oil accumulation of 12.5mmbbl recoverable reserves.
With the petroleum system proven in this area, the challenge is understanding and modelling the connectivity of the channel-turbidite complex, determining which sandstone units are in communication and which are compartmentalized.
Excellent 3D seismic coverage provides valuable insight into basin structure and depositional trends to help identify leads. Horsetail splay faults branch out to the east, creating a series of terraces, stepping down into the basin, influencing depositional pathways and ponding of sediments. In addition to this, the effects of the Baleine carbonate platform are clearly seen on the data, diverting depositional systems, forcing the channel-turbidite sands to travel around the edge of the structural high. These structural elements combined have funneled the Turonian channel sands along an NE-SW corridor across the slope (Figure 1).
Bubale West-1X is the first appraisal well following the completion of Murphy’s 3-well exploration drilling campaign, and it is estimated Bubale discovery could require 3-5 appraisal wells in total to fully understand the resource size. The pre-drill estimate was estimated to hold 340mmbbl – 850mmbbl boe gross.
Latest Well Results
Spudded on 23rd July 2026, the Bubale West-1X lies 8 miles west of Bubale-1X, which discovered 30m net oil pay across Turonian and Cenomanian reservoirs with preliminary tests indicating high-quality light oil (Figure 2). The aim of Bubale West-1X is to test reservoir extent of the primary objective, Turonian reservoir sands. Bubale West-1X will also test for deeper oil levels, likely in the Cenomanian and Albian. Planned total depth of the well, spud within block CI-103 (Murphy 90%, Petroci 10%) is unknown at this time, but the original Bubale-1X well reached 6,263m across the border in block CI-709 (90% Murphy, 10% Petroci).
Given the development challenges of related nearby fields such as Paon, it will be interesting to see how many wells would be required to develop the Bubale discovery. As exploratory efforts intensify, Côte d'Ivoire is poised to enter a transformative era of energy leadership and economic growth.
TGS has invested extensively in this region and offers high-quality seismic datasets that provide border-to-border coverage of offshore Côte d’Ivoire, essential for determining play concepts, mapping prospects, and de-risking before drilling.
Visit the TGS seismic data library or contact AMMESales@tgs.com to schedule a data showing.
Go Deeper:
West African Transform Margin – Multi-Client Hotspot: https://hubs.ly/Q04wXQ3L0
Derisking Exploration Through an Integrated Interpretation Workflow from Legacy Seismic to Reliable AVO: Lessons from West African Basins: https://hubs.ly/Q04wXQN80
West African Deepwater Plays: Tracking the Cretaceous Mega-Clastic Systems: https://hubs.ly/Q04wXRh20
