Africa New Energies

Africa New Energies was founded in 2011, after Stephen Larkin was invited by the Namibian government to propose a solution for its pending electricity shortages. We were funded by the United Nations affiliated African Innovation Foundation to perform a pre-feasibility study into creating a mechanism to bring about universal clean electricity access to Namibia, in a way that could be repeatable to the half a billion Sub-Saharan Africans who currently lack access. After considering all potential sources, we came up with our Stranded Natural Gas to Solar strategy – where we use our proprietary surface exploration algorithms to locate smaller deposits of stranded natural gas to generate electricity and use the profits to replace the gas with solar over a 20 year period. We were able to make this offer, as we had spent over 7 years in research and development developing these techniques for this purpose. You can imagine our amazement when the first surface geochemical results indicated that not only was there a strong indication of gas, but also of light crude. Our first reports were indicating that we could be sitting on a major hydrocarbons province with billions of barrels rather than a marginal natural gas deposit, which was what we first expected. Even with a conservative view of a payzone(depth) of just 10 foot thick, this equates to a gross unrisked prospective resource of over 1.6 billion barrels on the top seven prospects alone. The company is currently embarked on a pre-drilling exploratory programme involving our surface exploration technique technology with the intention of spudding our first well in 2016.