Uruguay has completed its offshore consortium map for the first time, with QatarEnergy and Chevron joining two Shell-operated blocks and closing out a seven-block exploration platform now shared among six global majors.
The move, formalized on March 25 and officially announced by the Administración Nacional de Combustibles, Alcohol y Pórtland (ANCAP), Uruguay's state energy company, on April 16, brings committed work programs to $233 million, advances a 3D seismic campaign now 22% complete, and confirms the first exploration well in Uruguay's offshore basin since 2016 — all without any commercial discovery in the country's exploration history to date.
The capital now committed rests on a geological analogy the coming drill campaign is designed to test. Uruguay's Pelotas Basin, the South Atlantic passive-margin basin shared with southern Brazil, is assumed to share the active Aptian pre-salt lacustrine kitchen that underpinned the Venus, Graff, and Mopane discoveries in the Orange Basin on Namibia's Atlantic margin, one of the frontier plays that reshaped pre-salt exploration economics over the past decade.
Whether that assumption holds is what the majors' capital is now positioned to find out. For now, YPF's Horacio Marín, its chairman and CEO, is still waiting five months on for Uruguay's executive branch to approve the transfer of the OFF-5 operatorship to ENI, the Italian energy company, while the rest of the board filled in around him.
The Consortium Map After March 25
Per ANCAP's communiqué, Shell retains 70% and operatorship in OFF-2, with QatarEnergy, Qatar's state energy company, taking the remaining 30% as a non-operating partner. In OFF-7, Shell holds 40% and operatorship, with QatarEnergy and Chevron, the U.S. energy major, on 30% each. All three contracts sit under the exploration and production regime established through Uruguay's open-door offshore round, a standing-invitation licensing framework in which international majors nominate blocks rather than bidding into fixed-date auction rounds.
Uruguayan acreage following the March 25 moves is distributed as follows: OFF-1 operated by Chevron (60%) alongside Sintana Energy (40%, the small-cap explorer also active in Namibia's Orange Basin that absorbed Challenger Energy in 2025); OFF-2 with Shell (70%) and QatarEnergy (30%); OFF-3 with Sintana Energy (100%); OFF-4 with APA Corporation and Shell (50-50, APA operator); OFF-5 with YPF, Argentina's state-controlled oil and gas company, at 100% through its MIWEN subsidiary, the vehicle YPF uses for its Uruguayan offshore holdings, pending transfer of 50% and operatorship to ENI; OFF-6 with APA at 100%; and OFF-7 with Shell (40%), QatarEnergy (30%), and Chevron (30%).
Three Years to Fill the Board
The sequence that produced the current map began in 2023, when ANCAP awarded the blocks to Shell, APA Corporation, YPF, and Challenger Energy (now Sintana Energy after the acquisition). The first significant move came in 2024 with Chevron's return to Uruguay after half a century of absence: the Houston-based company took 60% and operatorship of OFF-1 through a farm-in with Challenger. Chevron had drilled in 1976 some 150 kilometers off Punta del Este, on the Uruguayan Atlantic coast, without commercial success.
In November 2025, ENI acquired 50% and operatorship of OFF-5 in a farm-in with YPF, effective once Uruguayan authorities approve. That formal sign-off remained pending as of April 17. The board-closing move came on March 25 with QatarEnergy's entry, its first operation in Uruguay, and Chevron's expansion to a second block.
Mopane, the Orange Basin, and Uruguay's Mirror
The Namibian reference is not ornamental. On March 23, Galp Energia, the Lisbon-based energy company, published its Integrated Management Report 2025 with a material revision for the Mopane complex in Namibia's PEL 83 offshore permit. Mopane's 3C contingent resources were revised up from 875 million to 1.38 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe), a 57% increase over the previous report.
Galp is farming down a 40% stake to TotalEnergies, the French energy major, which will assume operatorship and plans a three-well campaign in the second half of 2026, with final investment decision (FID) targeted for 2028 and first oil for 2032.
The Orange Basin analogy does not rest on the younger Cretaceous section but on the older Aptian pre-salt lacustrine layer, the same stratigraphic interval that produced the 2022 Venus discovery and the 2024 Mopane complex. That is the system Uruguayan operators are seeking to confirm in the Pelotas Basin: an active source kitchen that is not present along every passive margin of the South Atlantic.
The seismic program currently underway is designed to image that specific layer, not the overlying package. The two margins shared tectonic structures before continental separation, which anchors the working hypothesis the majors are pursuing.
Multi-Client Seismic Has Surveyed 564 km²
The 3D seismic acquisition campaign feeding the new partners' work programs began on March 1. As of March 25, the BGP Prospector vessel, operating under a multi-client agreement between ANCAP and CGG Services US Inc. (Viridien, the French geoscience and technology company), had acquired 564 km² of seismic data, equivalent to 22% of the volume planned for the first season, according to ANCAP. The operation is supported by the Moonrise G supply vessel and the Uruguayan-flagged escort vessel WP Halle.
The first season began on block OFF-1, operated by Chevron, and extends across other blocks in the cluster, including acreage where Shell is operator. The marine fauna observer team accompanying the operation logged 207 sightings and 31 passive acoustic monitoring detections between February 25 and March 22, with 17 delays and 40 shutdowns of the acoustic source triggered by fauna in the mitigation zone. ANCAP reported no environmental or safety incidents during the period.
Next Up: APA's Rig and the Wait for ENI
With the map complete, sector attention shifts to drilling. APA Corporation, which operates block OFF-6 in water depths of more than 2,000 meters roughly 210 kilometers offshore, plans to drill an exploration well at an estimated cost of $200 million between the second half of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027, according to coverage by Argus, the energy price reporting agency. It would be the first well drilled in Uruguay's offshore basin since 2016, when TotalEnergies abandoned an attempt on the same platform without a commercial find.
Uruguay's exploration history totals just three wells: two in the 1970s and the 2016 attempt. None were productive. The operational campaign APA must file with Uruguay's Ministry of Environment calls for a dynamic-positioning drillship, four support vessels, and roughly 110 days of activity, 79 of which correspond to drilling itself.
The other move the sector is watching is formal executive-branch approval of YPF's OFF-5 farmout to ENI. The deal was signed on November 25, 2025, and its effectiveness is conditional on that sign-off. Once cleared, ENI would assume operatorship of the 16,883-km² block and could bring forward an exploration well between 2027 and 2028, after completing analysis of the 3D seismic.
For all the capital committed and the map now filled in, the investment thesis still runs through a single stratigraphic layer the majors believe mirrors what Namibia proved, and that a Uruguayan drill bit has never tested.