MSGBC 2026 to Put Guinea-Bissau Deepwater Acreage, Partner Terms in Focus
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Guinea-Bissau will arrive at MSGBC Oil, Gas & Power 2026 during one of its busiest offshore periods in nearly two decades. Chevron’s entry in November 2025 brought a supermajor into the country’s deepwater for the first time, and national oil company Petroguin has since signed a joint venture with Tender Oil & Gas and a seismic reprocessing agreement with TGS. Petroguin’s terms for new partners and the deepwater blocks open for investment are expected to anchor the Guinea-Bissau National Spotlight, one of five country sessions in the conference’s Investment Forum on December 3.
The session comes a year after Chevron signed production sharing contracts for the Carapau and Peixe Espada licenses, taking a 90% operated interest in each. Petroguin holds the remaining 10%, and Chevron bears the full cost of exploration during a six-year exploration phase. The company is interpreting existing 2D and 3D seismic before setting a drilling program, and has said its entry premise is oil, unlike the gas focus that has defined recent investment in the basin.
Petroguin has followed Chevron’s arrival with new partnerships across the deepwater. In April, it formed a joint venture with Tender Oil & Gas covering Blocks 5C and 6C, built around new 2D and 3D seismic acquisition. Petroguin Director General Alfredo Malú said the agreement would bring “greater dynamism in the country’s oil sector, with the short- and medium-term goal of advancing exploration drilling.”
The national oil company is also improving the data available to incoming operators. In October, it signed an agreement with Norwegian geoscience firm TGS to reprocess more than 11,000 km² of 3D seismic from the 2018 JAAN survey. Reprocessing will be underway by the time delegates meet at MSGBC 2026, with results expected in late 2027, and TGS will market the data on a multi-client basis so every operator evaluating Guinea-Bissau acreage works from the same modernized dataset.
Dubai-based Apus Energy, represented on the spotlight panel by Drilling Manager Michael Mosesyan, holds the acreage where Guinea-Bissau’s deepwater drilling began. Its Sinapa and Esperança licenses lie near Senegal’s producing Sangomar field, and its Atum-1X well became the country’s first deepwater exploration well in 2024. The licenses carry an estimated 467 million barrels of unrisked prospective resources, and Apus is seeking a partner to finance a potential appraisal campaign in 2027.
Titled ‘Frontier Exploration & Strategic Partnerships’, the National Spotlight brings Petroguin’s case before investors at MSGBC 2026 to discuss offshore block opportunities and the entry incentives available to new partners. Guinea-Bissau will go into the session seeking drilling commitments on more of its deepwater acreage.
Organized by Energy Capital & Power under the High Patronage of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and in partnership with the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, MSGBC Oil, Gas & Power 2026 takes place December 1–3 at the Centre International de Conférences Abdou Diouf in Dakar. For more information and registration, visit www.msgbcoilgasandpower.com.