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Bw Energy Ltd
5/5/2025
A warm welcome to this first quarter 2025 and Moromba FID. The long gestation period is over. Presentation by BW Energy. This presentation will be hosted by Jerome Berthet, our chief technical officer and in charge of the Maromba project. Thomas Young, our chief strategy officer, who is here to present the financials we have, or the project financials. And then Brice will round up the presentation and complete the quarter. We also have some key people from the Maromba, not only project, but involved in our Moromba development, our Brazil office. So we have, and if you can raise up when I say your name, that's fine. Alex Almeida, he's our regulatory responsible for Moromba and Brazil. We have Chris Boyers, our subsurface For Maromba, we have Thomas Kolansky, our Chief Business Development Officer. We have Kei Ikeda, who's responsible for the FPSO refurbishment. And last but not least, Ricardo Mucci, who's our GM in Brazil. So, please ask these guys questions. I know there's some questions around regulatory process, etc. Please benefit from having these people here and ask questions after we've finished the presentation. Then please note our disclaimer, as usual. So highlights for the first quarter. We recorded a quarterly EBITDA record. Very pleased with that. We had a $74.8 per barrel realized oil price. We may not see that next quarter, but still was good to have such a quarter. We had a net production of 36,000 barrels per day, which gave us 3.7 million barrels sold in the quarter. And we made a substantial oil discovery on Verdun. So the other highlight is, of course, the Maromba FID, which we're going to present today. And we had a very solid cash position of close to $287 million. So the key figures for the revenue, we were suitably up on the first quarter last year, 55%, $282 million. and also up on the fourth quarter due to improved production regularity. We had EBITDA of 182, also significantly up and net profit of 83. And we had an operating cash flow of 155 million, also significantly up on first quarter 24 and the last quarter. We have a diversified asset base and I am particularly fond of these numbers. We have close to 600 million barrels of 2P2C reserves, which to me talks to that we have a long a long horizon in front of us. We have 230 million barrels of 2P reserves net, and we have 10 operated fields. We're also involved in one non-op operation. Last year we produced 10 million barrels, about 27 000 net barrels per day 10 million barrels but that gives you a kind of perspective on the longevity of our business I think and it's a pretty good resource position for a company our size So our production increased in the first quarter. Very good regularity on all operations. And of course, we then could also note a reduced unit cost, mainly due to the increased volume, but also some increased efficiencies in consumption of natural gas, diesel, fuel, etc. We had another reasonable quarter in terms of environment. We had zero lost time incidents, but we did have one environmental incident. That was a spill of drill fluid due to equipment malfunction. It's been, of course, notified to the local authorities and dealt with. Then on to Gabon. Doosafu production was 2.6 million barrels, up 3% from the fourth quarter. Very good regularity, as I mentioned. And we had all production wells online. And our operating cost reduced to just below $10 per barrel. Please note that we have changed the reporting regime. We are excluding some royalties and tariffs and this is to be in line with what is common when you report costs per barrel. So we have a break in our reporting so if you look for numbers across you will see that but it is because we are now more in line with what is usual in our business. We had a very good turn on Beurdon with a nice discovery. We have discovered very good reservoir and we have the best fluid quality of all the D'Ussufu discoveries so far. So we're very pleased with that. We drilled three penetrations, two into the main reservoir and we are very confident with what we have found. So we are going to very shortly start the process of planning a development similar to what we have done on Hibiscus Rouge. And the initial plan is for four wells. But of course, we are now fast tracking our understanding of the nearby bumps as well to see or to map out an appraisal program that will go along with this development. So very exciting. And again, bodes well for Ducifu and continued success there. Then on to Brazil. Golfino also saw a good increase in uptime and we were up 12% on production to 656,000 barrels per day. Operating costs came down a bit to 42.2 per barrel. We had an unfortunate shutdown of Petrobras gas supply due to maintenance, which affected previous quarters. But that was completed and we now have full gas supply again. We will, with the FID Golfino Boost project, now focus not on drilling infield wells, which was our original plan, but on making incremental improvements in the production facilities to increase uptime, also reduce gas consumption, and install subsurface ESP skids, mudline ESP skids, that will increase the production from the existing production infrastructure. So the target is about 3,000 barrels per day and releasing about 12 million barrels of additional reserves. The investment is calculated to about $100 million, and we have a break-even of this investment at $47 per barrel. So we think it's a very attractive project. And then on to Namibia. The Karas appraisal well planning is going well. We are currently in negotiations with rig owners about rig availability. We talk of course also to our peers and it's of course good to see that people around us are still making discoveries. So Rhino just announced a sizeable discovery just south of us. So that's good. So our process is tracking well. Our long lead items are in or will be in-house by june so we are ready to go in the second half some uncertainty on to exactly what rig and rig availability so we may be third quarter we may be fourth quarter we don't know yet depends on the rig that we choose in the end So we had a very accretive start to 2025, the Burdon Discovery, the Golfino Boost FID, and then the subject of this presentation from here on, the Maromba FID, which will be a transformative project for BW Energy. We expect the project to yield about 123 million barrels of 2P reserves. We target first oil end of 2027. And it has an exceptional IRR at more than 30% at $60 per barrel flat forever. And a breakeven of 40 at 10%. It will deliver a doubling of BW, or more than a doubling of BW Energy's net production. So it's a super interesting project for BW Energy and will have material impact on the company. The concept we have finally been able to develop after quite a bit of back and forth and that's been mainly caused by swings in in the market what is available and at what price the new concept we benefit from the availability of large jackup drilling rigs capable of operating in the water depth of maromba The new concept is based on a jack-up that will be converted to a wellhead platform with full drilling facilities. The development will consist of six plus six wells. The first six will go in and will give production to underpin the investment in the infrastructure. But the real objective in the second set is to also appraise the other resources that are available in the Maromba concession. Again, just to remind you, we have 100% working interest. Our target is a plateau production of about 60,000 barrels per day. And the total COPEX, that's including the 12 wells, is 1.5 billion. The Maromba was discovered back in 1980. When it was discovered, it was one of the biggest discoveries of its decade. So it was a very big, big thing when it was found. Petrobras and their partners drilled nine wells, eight found oil. And they made five penetrations in what is called the Maastrichtion. It's a very well-defined sand and it's been highly appraised and delineated, as you can understand, by all these penetrations. They also carried out two drill stem tests where they confirmed the reservoir quality and the productivity of the wells so what we are addressing with the first 500 million barrels is very well defined very well proven reserves and that's going to underpin the development but there's a lot more in the Maromba concession. There's underlying carbonates. There's a lot. There's Lobo and a number of names on secondary targets. And the concept we have developed, and that's why we're so pleased with this concept, allows us to unlock all these potential all this potential in addition to the Maastrichtian. So the Maastrichtian in itself is a super world class project, which you will hear much more about from the later presenters. But the price is, of course, to unlock some of these additional reserves. So the first phase is the Maastrichtian, the focus on Maastrichtian, six wells, plain vanilla, get production going. And then we have the capacity to drill and appraise and infill, et cetera, to really benefit from the resources. The potential is significant. We have The estimates are around 1 billion barrels of oil in place. So we can maybe not multiply by seven, which we have been able to on Dusevu. That would be great, but maybe not realistic. But we do definitely have a fantastic runway. So the future is to unlock these reserves and create very much the same type of dynamics that we've had on Dusefu. So with that, I will hand over to Jerome, who will take you through the project. Thank you.
Good morning. I will take you through the various aspects of the Maromba project, starting with the field layout. We intend to deliver the first store in 30 months from today. and we will be using a wallet platform which will be a repurposed jackup as you see on the illustration and it will drill the wells and as well support the production during the 20 years of operations the production will be then routed to the FPSO Maromba which will process the oil, gas and water and store the oil before it's offloaded. We intend to use DP shuttle tankers for the offload due to the weather conditions in the compost basin. If we look now into a bit more details, the wellhead platform, as I said, is a repurposed jack-up. It will hold 16 slots, so we will be able to drill our 12 wells, but there will be some spares for future development and for future upside. The idea of the jack-up will also be to support the ESP change-out when we are in operation with the Dereck. And when we won't have any more development, we will replace the Dereck by a hydraulic workover unit. So it will host all the personnel to drill. So it has a 140 POB living quarter and it will be converted in a shipyard. We are actually tundering it now. All the production from the wallet platform will be transferred to the FPSO via a flowline, so it's a 10-inch and a 6-inch flowline, and the process will be made on the FPSO. The FPSO will be designed to handle 100,000 barrels of liquids. 65,000 barrels of oil and 85,000 barrels of water. And it will be able to store one million barrels of oil before it gets offloaded to shuttle tankers. Now, if I go to the FPSO, so the FPSO was acquired by BW Energy. It's ex-FPSO Polvo, which was operating for BW Offshore. It's currently in a shipyard in Dalian at Costco. So we've conducted a FID, Basic Engineering Studies, to define all the scope that we need to carry to be suitable for the Maromba oil and the Maromba field. And we have done in-depth inspections to understand what's required as steel renewal and refurbishment so it can be operating for 20 years on Maromba. The Polvo FPSO was a turret mode FPSO. We've decided after some studies to transition from that to a spread mode FPSO. We believe that it's a much better solution and it's saving as well on the planning and I will show that in the next slides. So this is a top view of the ex-FPSO Polvo, which is going to be FPSO Maromba. And we have color coded the scope. So what is in blue on the illustration is new. So we will replace the offloading holes, the LEDEC. We are refurbishing the living quarter. We are installing actually three new floors of living quarters, which were found not in condition for new use. As I said, it's going to be spread mode, so we will add the structure to support the chain stoppers and all the facilities to spread mode the FPSO. On the process side, we will mostly reuse the existing Polvo process. We will refurbish it, obviously, and we will replace only the heat exchanger at the inlet of the process to be suitable for the new use at Maromba. The boilers were inspected and found not in condition to reuse, so we will purchase new boilers for the Maromba project. For the wallet platform itself, as Carl said, we benefit from availability of heavy duty jackups. We've secured a jackup for Maromba. So the Jacob will be both drilling and supporting the production for the 20 years. We have been through detailed studies on soil and lake penetration at Maromba and also structural studies. as we are close to the limit of the jack-up capability in terms of water depth. So we've done the static and the fatigue analysis and we've confirmed that the rig that we have selected is suitable for Maromba conditions. One of the challenges we had to overcome was the conductor pipes you see in pink on the illustration. We need to keep those in position for 20 years because we are using dry trees. The span between the deck of the Jacob and the seafloor is quite high. So to mitigate this and limit the bending moment, we will install a subsea template that you see on the bottom. And this template will be installed by the jack-up itself. So that will be fully self-installable in Brazil. There is no specific equipment that will be used for the installation, only supply vessels. And we have the story of Mabomo on this. We have done that before in the group. We will start by a six-well drilling campaign. That will start when the wellhead platform will be installed and the template is in place. We will be drilling at a depth of 2,900 meters and we will land in the Maastricht-Chen reservoir with an 800-meter horizontal section. The weld will be completed by a gravel pack completions to deal with the sand and to control the sand and with ESPs activation. One key factor for us to go for dry tree solution was to be able to maintain our ESP. As you know, the run life of ESP is 3 to 5 years, so we need to have a way of maintaining them. And the solution we've selected is really made for that. Our design is also flexible for future upside, so we will be able to connect flexible risers for gas import, as we see that along the life of the field we will be gas deficient, so we will have to import gas from others. We have a risk that the aquifer is not connected to all the portions of the reservoir, So we have left space available for future water injection on the process and as well space available to put water injection risers on the wallet platform and FPSO. So we will leave space for further upside on both units. Looking at the planning now, we are intending to have first oil in 30 months from now. The FPSO is currently at the Costco Dalian shipyard. We have a 24-month program before it leaves the shipyard. The main constraint on these 24 months are the boilers that we are intending to purchase very shortly and the living quarters that we are refurbishing and, as I said, building three floors new. The wallet platform has been secured, so we have purchased the jacket. The delivery is scheduled for Q4 2025. We are working on the detailed scope for the yard. that we will shortly tender. The idea being to start the refurbishment and conversion as soon as the J-Cup reaches the yard early 26. So this activity will take 8 to 9 months before we can drive the J-Cup to Brazil for its installation on Maromba field. and we will start drilling end of Q1-27, early Q2-27, the intent being that we have two wells completed when the FPSO is ready to start. So we will have first oil with two wells already drilled. The surf is critical because the delivery of flowlines and umbilical is quite long these days. So we have launched a tender already and we intend to order that by the summer and it's a 22 to 24 months delivery. And finally, the drilling. So we will drill the six wells in a row. The drilling is 51 to 53 days per well. And as I said, we will start production after two wells and we will be in seam-ups between production and drilling after that. We mapped out a robust regulatory roadmap. It's very small, but it's really to show you how detailed we went to map all the processes that we will go with the regulatory bodies to get validation on the various aspects of the project. Our strategy is to engage early and be proactive with the different regulatory body in Brazil to make sure that we receive early feedback and we can incorporate that in our design. Also, we will get the agencies in the yard so that they can audit the unit before it gets to Brazil. We can have the full list of commands and punch lists if there is one, so that we can solve that in the shipyard rather than offshore. We know that we will be more efficient in the shipyard to deal with commands than offshore. And finally, our strategy is to repurpose existing unit and this has a significant impact on our greenhouse gas emission. So we've calculated the impact on both FPSO and the wallet platform. And as you can see, the FPSO refurbished will generate 75% less CO2 than if it was a new build. And the wallet platform itself will be 65% lower emissions than if we had built a new jacket type platform. So this is a cycling economy. I will hand over the presentation to Thomas, who will talk about the financing. Thank you. Thank you, Jerome.
Hello, everyone. I'll start off with giving a bit of an overview of the CAPEX for the project, a bit more granularity. You have the $1.5 billion that's for the Weller platform, the FBSO, and the 12 wells. And to break that down a bit further, we have $1.2 billion for the initial six wells, plus the FBSO, plus Weller platform, and then $300 million that comes in the secondary phase. Prior to the first oil, we're looking at roughly $1 billion, and you can see that kind of spread out fairly flat on the phasing of the project. In terms of the 1.2, roughly 70% of the 1.2 billion relates to the production infrastructures, the FBSO and the Weller platform. That's a relatively stark difference to where we were before with the subsea development. It was rather flipped. It was 30% infrastructure, 70% wells. The benefit we get from that is we managed to reduce the incremental well cost in a dry tree development case, which is fairly impactful. So the first benefit we get is obviously we get a higher well inventory because the threshold just went down. A dry tree well at 45 is roughly one third of the cost of a subsea well. So it means that we can add these next six wells and they're all in the same proven reserves and they're all highly economical. But it also means we can de-risk the project quite a bit. I mean, it's cheaper to deal with issues as they arise. I mean, dealing with ESP workovers is cheaper, faster, you know, with the integrated drilling platform. And we can do further appraisal work. It costs roughly 30 million for an appraisal well. That will allow us to further appraise the field and then set up the subsequent phases, which is what we did at Ducifu. It also allows us to test some of the nearby carbonates and the producibility of the field. Carl mentioned that, you know, there is carbonates around a restriction main and there's also a lot of carbonates over in the west of the field. And that allows us to kind of test and set up hopefully the subsequent phases as we move around. So I'd like to just carry over this one billion. That's quite important. Here you can see the split of the same 1.5, but the pre and post first oil. Obviously, post first oil, it's financed with the funds that we produce at Marumba, which is significant. But prior, it has to come from external sources. We have initially cash and RBL, so that's cash and available on the RBL. Just as a reminder, the RBL is a revolving credit facility. We can draw down on that, distribute it, and spend it on Maromba as we see fits. We use that to adjust our interest exposure. Secondary, we have the FBSO financing. That's a dedicated project financing for the FBSO. It's export credit agency-backed, so ECA-backed. with Cynosure. It's with a group of Middle Eastern banks led by ADCB and ABC Bank. And China Exim is in it as well. It's relatively long term. It's nine and a half years door to door. Because of DCA component, it has a lower margin, which is great. And overall, it works well for us because we can draw as we require it. The weather platform lease, we signed a term sheet with someone that we worked with before. It functions as a traditional lease in the sense that it's 100% financed effectively. It's up to 275 million, and it has a tenor of roughly construction plus 10 years, so a long tenor, which is helpful. Finally, we have a committed shareholder loan from our largest shareholder, BW Group, of 250 million. That's available to us should we need it. It's a 36 month kind of working capital loan that we can put in place rather quickly. So we see Do we need it? Do we not? But that's there for us to use if we need to in relation to Maromba. Finally, you have the free cash flow from the rest of the business. That includes Dusafug, Gofinio, CapEx for Rouge Phase 2, Boost, et cetera. So you can see kind of all in all, we're in a good spot when it comes to funding the Maromba project. I'm going to jump to OPEX. I say it's predictable. It looks very variable. What I mean is, well, it's variable here because of the OPEX per barrel. What I mean is it's the underlying absolute OPEX is fairly predictable and steady and flat. Only 5%, 10% of the OPEX is variable. And when I say variable, it's variable with production. And then I mean it's primarily lifting costs. So you produce more. you lift more, DP Shuttle tankers come in more often, you incur a higher cost when you do that. But generally, it's pretty flat. We benchmarked this with the fields around Maromba. Polvo, we know very well. the power field, Papatera field, Peregrino field. But most importantly, we benchmarked it with Gofinio. That's our operated field. It's with an FBSO. It's in Brazil. So we have a decent handle on the OPEX. A key difference with Gofinio, Gofinio is gas deficient. We're importing gas. That costs quite a bit. We don't have that issue in Maromba just yet. The infrastructure at Gofinio is older, so more repair, life extension, maintenance costs. But on Maromba, we also have an extra piece of infrastructure, which is the Weller platform, and that will add a little bit of OPEX. So generally, we're in a good spot with OPEX, and hopefully we'll see some synergies between Maromba and Gofinio as well. The kind of five-year weighted average OPEX per barrel on Maromba is expected to be roughly $9 per barrel. The fiscal regime is a simple concession arrangement. So unlike Gabon, in Gabon we have a PSC, which is more a partnership model with the state. We pay our tax in kind, in barrels. Here in Brazil, it's just corporate tax and royalties. This is a round zero license, so it's even simpler. The later licenses have special participation tax. Other types of tax, we avoid that. We also do not have any local content requirements on Maromba because it's a round zero license. So we added a comparison here. It's from Reistad. Shows comparisons of government takes. Obviously, lower is better. And actually, because Maromba is a round zero license, we sit a little bit below that. So we're somewhere between 35% and 40% government take, which is good. We included this graph here, Maromba's position among top global projects. This is from Goldman Sachs top 100 projects. It shows top as in having a low break even. Maromba isn't currently on the list, but maybe one day. The difference is really with these mega projects is typically you achieve scale by having a big investment. Bigger investment, you bring down scale, you bring down that cost per barrel. Really for Maromba, which currently sits in the top 10% of this list, you know, in comparative basis, we achieve that similar scale on the economics by redeploying infrastructures. Really by bringing down the cost of the infrastructure, we've actually able to bring down the break even, to $40 a barrel, which is quite significant. And you could say, yes, a greenfield is risky, but a greenfield can also be, with economics like this, can also be quite forgiving in the sense that, I mean, if you just take the Grand Morgue project in Suriname, that's a $10.5 billion project with a $57 breakeven. For us to achieve that and to still be below the average break-even of the top 100 projects, we could have a more than 50% overrun on the Maromba project. So it speaks a little bit about how robust the economics are in Maromba. Finally, we're set to generate material value. We set the target in 2020 of achieving 50,000 barrels of operated production. With Maromba, we'll get close to 100, especially together with all the other stuff we've got going on. We'll reduce our OPEX in half, which is big. Our OPEX per barrel will go from roughly $30 to roughly $15 per barrel, which will make a big difference. And it will give us diversity, and it will give us diversification, and it will also give us materiality, which is key. And I think most importantly, it will also continue to prove up this model where we take we buy undeveloped barrels, we unlock them through repurposing existing infrastructure, which which allows us to get great economics like this. And there's not a lot of other companies like us that do greenfield developments like this. So, yeah, I'll leave it at that and hand over to Brice.
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