Afentra Shares Jump on Angola Oil Discovery and Well Restart

Afentra (LON: AET), the AIM-listed oil and gas producer focused on Angola, saw its shares surge sharply on Tuesday after announcing a significant oil discovery and the successful restart of a long-shut well offshore in Angola.

The stock traded up 11.3% to 70.7p by mid-morning, having opened at 71p and touched an intraday high of 74.1p, against Monday’s close of 63.5p. That puts the shares above both their 50-day and 200-day moving averages, though still below their 52-week high of 89.4p.

In a pre-market operational update, Afentra said its Pacassa SW well had found 136 metres of net oil pay, the thickness of rock actually containing recoverable oil, supporting management’s view that the wider structure could hold up to 70 million barrels of gross recoverable resources. Chief executive Paul McDade called it “a major milestone for the Block 3/05 partnership, representing the first well delivered on Block 3/05 in more than a decade.”

The update also confirmed the restart of the Impala-1 well, shut in since 2017, now producing around 3,000 barrels of oil per day after a low-cost light well intervention, a technique that revives an existing well without a full workover rig. The result also de-risks the planned Impala-2 development well, which is expected to begin drilling once Pacassa SW operations complete and is targeting an initial rate of roughly 4,000 barrels a day, with results due by the end of the fourth quarter.

Afentra also flagged a run of near-term catalysts: first oil from Pacassa SW in the third quarter, Impala-2 results by the end of the fourth quarter, completion of its Etu acquisition in the third quarter, and half-year results due in mid-September.

Shares responded immediately to the update, extending gains through the morning session as the market digested the scale of the Pacassa SW resource estimate alongside the low-cost proof of Afentra’s well-intervention strategy at Impala-1.