![COLUMN | The Twelve Days of Christmas 2025: Days 4 to 6 – Six Noble rigs-a-selling, Five million tons of Sunrise LNG and a four per cent stock rise for TotalEnergies (part one of two) [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2025-12-14%2F55gywuxw%2FUntitled.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me… a partridge in a pear tree, according to the ancient English carol, but at Baird Maritime, that's the cue for a dozen topical features about the offshore industry.
Lovers of festive traditions get scrolling, as for the sixth year in a row, we are running through the Twelve Days of Christmas, from an energy perspective.
The first three days appeared in two parts last week (here and here), covering the latest on Northern Ocean and Odfjell Drilling’s win/win rig deal, two subsea vessels ordered by Windcat and Dong Fang, and three reasons why the current continuing professional development scheme for dynamic positioning operators is flawed.
Now we move on through the traditional six geese a-laying, five gold rings and…
If you bought shares in TotalEnergies a year ago in Paris, they are up four per cent on the year and you would also have received a four per cent dividend yield. Beats four calling birds, in my opinion, and it also beats Chevron and Equinor’s one-year market performance.
If you bought shares in Galp Energia, the Portuguese player with interests in oil and gas in Sao Tome and Brazil, however, bad luck. Galp’s stock price has fallen 18 per cent over the last year. TotalEnergies’ rise is directly connected to Galp’s slump, with Galp’s shares plunging 12 per cent in a single day last week after a landmark press release.
On December 9, Galp announced that TotalEnergies will become its new partner in the Mopane discovery offshore Namibia. The deal gives TotalEnergies a 40 per cent stake in the PEL 83 licence, which contains the potentially multi-billion barrel, deepwater Mopane discovery there, along with operatorship of the field.
Galp will retain a 40 per cent in the block. In return, TotalEnergies will pay 50 per cent of Galp’s exploration, appraisal and development spending on Mopane until first oil, with repayment taken from 50 per cent of Galp’s cash flow from the block.
Galp will also gain a 10 per cent stake in TotalEnergies’ Venus discovery in Namibia, which is scheduled to be approved for development next year, and a 9.39 per cent stake in PEL 91. After the deal, TotalEnergies’ stake in Venus will fall to 35.25 per cent, the same size as partner QatarEnergy’s, whilst Galp and Namibian state oil company Namcor each hold 10 per cent, and lucky minnow Impact Oil and Gas will have 9.5 per cent.
TotalEnergies is planning 38 development wells for Venus, with European floating production contractor SBM short listed in a bidding process to provide a 160,000 barrel per day capacity floating production storage and offloading unit (FPSO) with two million barrels of storage and gas reinjection capacity, which would be moored in around 3,000 metres of water. Venus combines all the high cost of deepwater with all the high cost of relatively harsh environment as well, as does Mopane.
Investors had been hoping Galp would receive a much larger cash component for the 40 per cent of Mopane, and the Portuguese operator was hammered as a result when TotalEnergies made no upfront payment for the stake. However, I rate it as a good result for the Lisbon-headquartered player.
Galp’s problem is that Mopane with its potentially ten billion barrels of reserves is simply too big for the relatively small European company to develop, and too complicated for a company with very limited experience as a field operator. Galp has a market capitalisation of around US$11 billion, and it operates no large projects anywhere in the world, whereas TotalEnergies has US$145 billion of market capitalisation and decades of experience at bringing complex deepwater oil and gas projects to production.
Each of the five wells that Galp drilled in the exploration and appraisal of Mopane and the block so far have cost US$80 billion on average, as per company filings. A large FPSO, dozens of development wells and kilometres of subsea flowlines and risers would cost billions of dollars more, and Galp would also be paying for the costs of the ten per cent share of state oil company partner Namcor in the field.
Galp only made US$1.5 billion in annual profit in both 2023 and 2024. Funding the large-scale, capital-intensive development of Mopane would seriously stretch the company’s balance sheet.
Bringing TotalEnergies on board significantly reduces financing delays for the project, reduces operational risk, and brings on board the industry skills needed to get the oil out of the ground.
I would expect the Mopane field development to be approved in the next 18 months. Having a stake in Venus also diversifies Galp’s production in-country, mitigating the single-asset risk associated with Mopane, where a production disappointment of the sort Tullow experienced in Ghana would be a disaster for the company.
For Namibia, the green light for Venus will be a landmark to bring the country into the deepwater big league, and having a second development approved in 2027 would reinforce its status as a key new deepwater province. For TotalEnergies, there are potential cost savings and synergies running two large FPSOs in the same country from the same supply bases, and using the same vendors and infrastructure.
Berenberg cut Galp’s outlook to “hold” and its analysts estimate that first oil at Mopane will be achieved in 2032. The brokerage has assigned an initial unrisked value of US$320 million to Galp’s 10 per cent Venus stake, which partly offsets the reduction in value it assigned at Mopane when the TotalEnergies farm-in was announced. Berenberg cut Galp’s Namibian portfolio’s unrisked value by 20 per cent to just under US$4.4 billion, which is still 40 per cent of the whole value of the company.
Both Galp and Namibia as a country have a lot riding on TotalEnergies’ ability to deliver first oil quickly, safely, and on budget.
If TotalEnergies is fast-tracking Venus in Namibia, the Greater Sunrise LNG saga is one of the longest running and largest undeveloped field stories in the entire history of the oil and gas industry. Now, after five decades of conflict, the gas field is another step closer to coming to production, potentially boosting jobs and government revenues in one of Southeast Asia’s poorest countries.
The history of the field is tied up with a tragic and violent era of Indonesian and Timorese history.
In 1974, Woodside discovered the Troubadour and Sunrise oil and gas fields, collectively known as Greater Sunrise, in the waters off what was then the Portuguese colony of Timor, now Timor-Leste. The fields are located in around 300 metres of water depth, approximately 450 kilometres northwest of Darwin and 150 kilometres south of Timor-Leste.
After making various incursions as the Portuguese withdrew from the territory, including one where five Australian journalists were executed by Indonesian troops, in December 1975, Indonesia invaded Timor-Leste. Jakarta declared it Indonesia’s 27th province and embarked on a campaign of brutal suppression of the local, mainly Catholic, population.
The Indonesian forces advanced on the capital Dili, killing civilians as they went, and then fought to suppress a guerrilla insurgency over the next three decades (Wikipedia here). It is estimated that somewhere between 60,000 and 300,000 Timorese were killed in the Indonesian occupation between 1975 and 1999. No one has ever been held properly accountable for the massacres and the human rights abuses then.
Indeed, current Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto was a 26-year-old lieutenant in the Indonesian Army's Kopassus special operations unit when he arrived in East Timor in 1976. His mission was to find Nicolau Lobato, one of the leaders of Timor Leste’s resistance and pro-independence movement.
In 1978, Mr Lobabo was detained by Prabowo’s unit and was later arrested and killed. Amnesty International reports that his severed head was sent to then-Indonesian President Suharto as proof of his death.
It is also alleged that Mr Prabowo allegedly participated in one the bloodiest events of the Timor war: the Krakas massacre, in which over 200 Timorese, mostly civilians, were hunted down and killed by Kopassus units in 1983.
When Greater Sunrise were discovered, the maritime boundary between Indonesia and Australia had been agreed a couple of years before, but Portugal had never confirmed the boundary between its colony and Australia, creating a blank space in maps for the undefined border, a blank known as the “Timor Gap” in which the gas fields lay.
No matter, in 1979 Australia decided to recognise Indonesia’s annexation of Timor-Leste, so it could negotiate and finalise the maritime boundary to close the Timor Gap and permit the development of Greater Sunrise by Woodside once an agreement with Indonesia could be reached.
In 1989, Australia and Indonesia signed the Timor Gap Treaty. The treaty established a zone of cooperation (ZOC) between Timor-Leste and Australia (later called the JPDA), north of the median line between Timor and Australia. The treaty provided for joint Indonesia-Australia exploration of the waters, with revenues to be shared 50/50 between the two states.
Unfortunately for Indonesia, the country was hard-hit by the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and plunged into political turmoil when its dictator, President Suharto, was toppled amid riots in 1998. His successor, B. J. Habibie, organised a referendum under the sponsorship of the United Nations on whether Timor-Leste should remain in Indonesia or become independent.
In 1999, an overwhelming majority of Timor-Leste’s population voted for independence from Indonesia. This prompted anti-independence Timorese militias, organised and supported by the Indonesian military, to embark on an orgy of violence.
The pro-Indonesian forces killed over 1,000 Timorese and drove another 300,000 people into the neighbouring Indonesian province of West Timor as refugees to escape the killing. The militias also destroyed the country's infrastructure. However, finally, Timor-Leste was internationally recognised as an independent nation in 2002.
This was a little unfortunate for Woodside and the Australian Government, as they now had an impoverished independent state on their doorstep, which demanded a fairer deal for Greater Sunrise than had been negotiated with the murderous president Suharto over the heads and dead bodies of the local people.
Field development was further complicated by the geology of the Timor Sea, with a 2,000-metre-deep trench lying between Greater Sunrise and Timor-Leste. Woodside proposed that the gas be produced in Australia or via a floating LNG unit, both of which would be cheaper and technically easier than piping it across the deepwater trench. The government in Dili rejected these proposals and insisted on an LNG plant being built in their poor and undeveloped state.
So, for another two decades after independence, the gas sat in the ground whilst the two sides bickered. Australia and Timor-Leste negotiated various new takes on the ZOC/JDPA concept, and the government increased its stake in the project in 2019 by buying out Shell and ConocoPhillips to give state-owned Timor Gap a 56.56 per cent interest in Greater Sunrise.
Now there seems to be a festive breakthrough.
We’ll see what good news there is for the long-suffering people of Timor Leste, and for the long-suffering shareholders of Woodside in part two later this week.
Correction
One of our readers spotted a typo in the piece on Windcat and CMB for the second day of Christmas last week. We mistakenly wrote that Norwegian brokerage house Fearnleys had commented that 2027 would potentially see a record number of deliveries of new build CSOVs (commissioning service operation vessels). Somehow, an additional “O” incorrectly appeared in the vessel category, and we have corrected the article.
Fearnleys actually said that it sees 2027 as, “potentially setting a new record for the highest number of CSVs [construction support vessels] delivered in any one year.”
Apologies.
