Borders & Southern Petroleum plc announces its unaudited half year financial statements for the six months to 30 June 2024. The accounts contained within this report represent the consolidation of Borders & Southern Petroleum plc and its subsidiary, Borders & Southern Falkland Islands Limited.
Highlights
· Operating loss for the period was $578,000 (30 June 2023: $558,000)
· Cash balance on 30 June 2024 was $0.756 million (31 December 2023: $1.9 million)
· Appointment of Harry Baker as CEO
· Appointment of Dr Sean Guest as Non-Executive Director
Borders & Southern has a world-class undeveloped gas transition asset, and the main focus of the Company is to progress the Darwin project by bringing in a partner to finance the appraisal of the Darwin East discovery or to drill other exploration wells with the view to bringing Darwin into production.
Since I joined the Company in March 2024, we have taken a number of important commercial decisions and made a number of key changes to move the business forward with the prime focus being to monetise rapidly the significant potential value of the Darwin gas condensate discovery. In pursuit of that, we have:
· Further refined our phased early production offering to appeal to potential international partners that requires relatively low capex and offers accelerated payback.
· Changed our energy financial advisor to a much larger company with international relationships that has relaunched the search process to identify a suitable partner and will provide updates on this process as events allow.
· Been more active in updating and keeping all stakeholders informed, both with one-on-one investor meetings and with regularly updated investor presentations on the Company's redesigned website.
· Continued to focus on lowering our cost base and have moved offices for a material reduction in overheads.
We have noticed that the energy industry is rebalancing in light of the longer transition timeframes to deliver renewable energies than previously envisaged with oil companies refocusing their investment activities back into upstream exploration and production. This has led to much more interest in material projects like Darwin that can be brought into production much faster than the lead time and costs involved in new exploration in frontier locations. The Company, therefore, remains confident that because of greater renewed upstream industry investment and exploration activity, Darwin will be a beneficiary of this trend. Darwin is a world-class asset awaiting appraisal and we now expect to be able to move forward to the next phase of its development.
The Company has made an application to The Falkland Islands Government to extend the Company's three Production Licenses with effect from the calendar year end of 2024, as has been done a number of times in previous years, and those discussions are at an advanced stage. Once finalised, an update will be provided.
Finally, as previously announced, Sean Guest was appointed a Non-Executive Director earlier this year. Sean is an internationally experienced upstream executive who brings extensive industry knowledge, technical skills and contacts to the board.
