Bounty Oil & Gas has entered into a binding share sale agreement to acquire all of the issued units in PetroQuest Liberia Deep Water ('PetroQuest'). PetroQuest holds a letter of engagement with the National Oil Company of Liberia ('NOCAL'), pursuant to which the NOCAL will negotiate and enter into a production sharing contract with the Liberia Petroleum Regulatory Authority ('LPRA') in respect of Block LB-32, a deepwater exploration block located in the Harper Basin, offshore the Republic of Liberia.
Key Highlights:
- Bounty Oil & Gas NL has entered into a binding share sale agreement to acquire 100% of the issued units in PetroQuest. PetroQuest holds a letter of engagement with the NOCAL, pursuant to which the NOCAL will negotiate and enter into a production sharing contract (PSC) with the LRPA in respect of Block LB-32.
- In conjunction with the acquisition, Bounty has received firm commitments to raise approximately $3,547,500 via a Placement, cornerstoned by Tribeca Investment Partners, L1 Capital Global Opportunities Master Fund and S3 Consortium (Stocks Digital) (Placement).
- Initial interpretation indicates that LB-32 contains a significant portion of the deepwater fan prospects, Jupiter and Zeus, as well as other leads.
- LB-32 is covered by modern 2D and 3D seismic, which the Company intends to access to complete due diligence, quantify prospective resources and potentially identify drillready prospects for farm-out.
- The coastline that includes LB-32 is interpreted to be the conjugate margin to Guyana, where major oil discoveries have been made recently, and there has been a subsequent uptick in interest from majors in the area (see Figure 1 below).
- The Deepwater fans targeted by Bounty offshore Liberia (where no wells have tested the play to date) have been the source of multiple discoveries offshore Guyana, Suriname, Ghana, Côte D’Ivoire, Senegal, Namibia and South Africa.
- Recent hostilities in the Middle East have also highlighted the fragility of the global oil supply chain and reignited investor/industry interest in oil and gas exploration against a backdrop of increasing energy requirements due to the AI/data centre build out.
Bounty Board Statement: 'The proposed acquisition of PetroQuest Liberia Deep Water LLC represents a significant opportunity for Bounty to secure exposure to a deepwater exploration block in the Harper Basin, offshore Liberia, while maintaining a disciplined structure that links material vendor upside to independent technical validation and farm-out delivery. Our immediate focus will be on completing due diligence, progressing the Production Sharing Contract pathway and obtaining the approvals required to move the transaction to completion. This transaction comes at a time when there have been significant movements by majors in the same play fairway in Liberia including TotalEnergies and in the adjoining jurisdictions including Petrobras and ExxonMobil.'
LB-32 – Deepwater Fans Defined by 3D Seismic
The proposed acquisition provides Bounty with exposure to a high-impact offshore exploration opportunity in Liberia, subject to completion of the conditions precedent.
Block LB-32 covers 2,322 km² in the Harper Basin, the south-eastern of Liberia’s two offshore basins, in water depths ranging from approximately 1,500 m to 4,200 m. The block adjoins Blocks LB-30 and LB-31 to the west and is bounded to the south-east by the Cape Palmas transform, which separates the Harper Basin from the Ivorian basins of Côte d’Ivoire. LB-32 was the last unlicensed block in the Harper Basin at the time PetroQuest secured rights over it.
Nature of the Block LB-32 rights
PetroQuest holds a letter of engagement issued by NOCAL under reference FML/NOCAL/130/2025 dated 7 October 2025 and countersigned on 10 October 2025, which confers the exclusive right to negotiate a PSC over Block LB-32, and PetroQuest is the prequalified applicant before the Liberia Petroleum Regulatory Authority in respect of that contract. Under Liberia’s executive allocation petroleum licensing framework, the President of the Republic of Liberia has allocated legal title to Block LB-32 to NOCAL.
NOCAL has agreed to grant PetroQuest an equity interest in Block LB-32 on execution of the PSC. Negotiation of the PSC over Block LB-32 will be conducted by PetroQuest, NOCAL and the LPRA and is subject to the approval of Parliament. Upon parliament ratification of the negotiated PSC over Block LB-32, the PSC will then be issued and executed between the parties accordingly. PetroQuest has advised that, since most of the PSC commercial terms have already been set forth in the legally binding letter of engagement, it expects that that the PSC negotiation and Parliament approval to be concluded by January 2027 or shortly thereafter.
LB-32 is covered by approximately 656 km² of 3D seismic and approximately 753 line-km of 2D seismic. The 3D data forms the eastern portion of the TGS Sunfish 3D survey, a multi-client survey of approximately 6,167 km² acquired in 2013 that extends westward across Blocks LB30 and LB-31. The Company intends to licence the LB-32 portion of this data from TGS as the first step in due diligence, prospective resource quantification and farm-out preparation. The Company has not yet reviewed the 3D data directly; the interpretation described in this announcement is based on published TGS and BluEnergies imagery and on the vendor’s technical work.
The primary target on Block LB-32 is the Upper Cretaceous basin floor fan play. Seismic amplitude and relative acoustic impedance extractions from the Sunfish 3D image a series of large, discrete fan bodies at Cenomanian and Turonian levels across the Harper Basin, deposited by sand-rich drainage systems eroding the granitic Liberian-Leonean craton and delivered to the basin floor through incised shelf canyons during Cretaceous lowstands.
The Jupiter (Turonian) and Zeus (Cenomanian) fans are of this type. These fans are stratigraphically trapped, sealed by Upper Cretaceous deep-marine shales that have proven effective in every well drilled along the Liberian margin, and sit directly above two regionally mature source rocks: the Aptian lacustrine (OAE I) and Cenomanian–Turonian marine (OAE II) shales that charge the discoveries at Jubilee (Ghana), Sangomar (Senegal) and the GuyanaSuriname Basin.
Live oil, including 38° API oil at Narina-1, was recovered from Upper Cretaceous slope fan and channel sandstones in the adjacent Liberian Basin during the 2009–2016 drilling campaigns, confirming an active oil-prone petroleum system. The basin floor fan play outboard of those discoveries remains undrilled in both the Liberian and Harper Basins.
Secondary play types include (i) the Upper Cretaceous slope fan and channel play, which is proven oil-bearing at Narina-1 and Bee-Eater-1 in the Liberian Basin but carries greater reservoir-quality and up-dip trap risk than the detached basin floor fans; (ii) Lower Tertiary (Paleocene–Oligocene) basin floor fans, which are shallower-buried and analogous to the Hammerhead reservoirs in Guyana; and (iii) the deeper Aptian–Albian syn-rift play, which is poorly imaged on the legacy data and will require reprocessing or new broadband acquisition to evaluate.
The Jupiter fan is a large Turonian-age basin floor fan system on the eastern side of the Sunfish 3D, which published third party materials indicate extends eastward into LB-32. The Zeus fan is a Cenomanian fan located near the LB-31/LB-32 boundary. Bounty will not report prospective resources for LB-32 until it has acquired the licensed 3D data and commissioned an independent evaluation by a qualified petroleum reserves and resources evaluator, as described under Acquisition Details. The proportion of each fan lying within LB-32 depends on the stratigraphic horizon mapped and will be confirmed by that evaluation.
The Harper Basin and the wider Liberian margin have seen a marked increase in majorcompany activity over the past twelve months. In September 2025, TotalEnergies signed PSCs over Blocks LB-6, LB-11, LB-17 and LB-29 (approximately 12,700 km²) in the Liberian Basin, with a firm 3D seismic commitment, and Atlas Oranto Petroleum signed PSCs over Blocks LB15, LB-16, LB-22 and LB-24; both sets of contracts were ratified by the Liberian legislature in December 2025 and were the first upstream contracts signed in Liberia in over a decade. In January 2026, TotalEnergies entered into a joint study and application agreement with BluEnergies Ltd (TSXV: BLU) under new Reconnaissance Licence RL-003, taking a 65% interest in the three Harper Basin blocks (LB-26, LB-30 and LB-31, approximately 8,924 km²) immediately west of LB-32. That work program includes reprocessing of the full Sunfish 3D by TGS, a multibeam seabed survey, seabed geochemical sampling and heat-flow measurement, with the stated intention of converting the reconnaissance licence into PSCs and selecting drilling locations.
BluEnergies has reported seven Cretaceous basin floor fans mapped on the 3D, six of which carry independently certified prospective resource estimates. These estimates relate solely to Blocks LB-26, LB-30 and LB-31, in which Bounty has no interest, and were prepared by BluEnergies and have not been independently verified by Bounty. Bounty has not confirmed the qualified petroleum reserves and resources evaluator responsible for those estimates or the reporting standard under which they were prepared (BluEnergies is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange), and Bounty has not carried out sufficient work of its own to report an estimate for Block LB-32 in accordance with Chapter 5 of the ASX Listing Rules.
Across the Cape Palmas transform in Côte d’Ivoire, Eni’s Baleine discovery (2021) was brought into production in August 2023 and is estimated by Eni to hold approximately 2.5 billion barrels of oil and 3.3 Tcf of associated gas and was followed by the Calao discovery in 2024. Petrobras signed eight deepwater PSCs offshore Côte d’Ivoire in June 2026, and Murphy Oil is drilling a three-well exploration campaign across its five Ivorian blocks. These developments demonstrate that the Upper Cretaceous fan play is being actively pursued by well-funded operators along the whole of the West African Transform Margin.
Prior to the opening of the Atlantic in the Cretaceous, the Liberia–Sierra Leone margin lay directly opposite the Guyana–Suriname margin of South America. The two margins share the same rift-to-drift history, the same Aptian and Cenomanian–Turonian source rock intervals, and the same Upper Cretaceous deepwater fan reservoirs.
On the Guyana side, this play was opened by ExxonMobil’s Liza-1 discovery in the Stabroek Block in 2015, with first production in 2019; ExxonMobil now reports discovered recoverable resources in the Stabroek Block of approximately 11 billion barrels of oil equivalent from more than 30 discoveries in Campanian–Santonian and Turonian–Cenomanian basin floor fan reservoirs. The Harper Basin fans imaged on the Sunfish 3D are of equivalent age, depositional style and scale, and sit within the oil window of the same source rocks. Directly analogous stratigraphic traps have also been proven in Namibia (Venus, Mopane) and Côte d’Ivoire (Baleine, Calao). The Company cautions that analogue basins do not guarantee exploration success, and that the Harper Basin basin floor fan play remains untested by drilling.
Extensive Existing Data – Low-Cost Path to Farm-out
A key benefit related to the acquisition of LB-32 is the extensive seismic coverage over the block. Whilst the Company has not yet fully reviewed this data, it expects to in the coming weeks. Prior to execution of the agreement with PetroQuest, consultants engaged by the Company were able to conduct high level due diligence via on online session with TGS, the seismic owner. This session provided enough encouragement to proceed with the transaction, subject to further analysis and interpretation once the dataset has been purchased.
The TGS data is high quality and was acquired between 2008 and 2013. The 2D seismic was reprocessed in 2024, and the 3D seismic is being reprocessed in 2026 by TGS, both using advanced modern techniques. Bounty considers that the quality and coverage of the data give it a reasonable prospect of defining drill-ready prospects for use in farm-out negotiations and accordingly is in advanced negotiations for commercial terms to purchase this data.
Strategic Advisor Appointment
Dave Wall, of GBA Capital Pty Ltd, has been engaged by the Company to assist with the strategy for maximising value from the existing assets and proposed acquisition of LB-32. Dave brings a wealth of experience in start-up oil and gas exploration having led 88 Energy (88E) for 7 years during which time the Company experienced an appreciation in market capitalisation from $1b and drilled multiple wells (as Operator) in addition to executing several successful farm-outs. He was also instrumental in facilitating the listing of other start-up explorers, including Invictus Energy Limited and Elixir Energy Limited.
Marketing Agreement
The Company has entered into a 12-month investor marketing and relations agreement (Investor Marketing and Relations Agreement) with Report Card Pty Ltd (ACN 092 598 859) (Report Card). Pursuant to the Investor Marketing and Relations Agreement, Report Card will provide the Company with access to issuer advertising products and services in consideration for $120,000 (plus GST). This payment will be satisfied through the issue of 6,666,666 Shares at a deemed issue price of $0.018 per Share, subject to Shareholder approval at the Company’s upcoming annual general meeting. The GST component of the cash consideration is payable in cash.
Acquisition Details
Bounty has entered into a binding share sale agreement to acquire all of the fully paid ordinary shares in PetroQuest, an Arizona limited liability company, from its shareholders. PetroQuest holds a letter of engagement (“Letter of Engagement”) with the National Oil Company of Liberia (“NOCAL”), pursuant to which the NOCAL will negotiate and enter into a PSC with the Liberia Petroleum Regulatory Authority (“LRPA”) in respect of Block LB-32, a deepwater exploration block located in the Harper Basin, offshore the Republic of Liberia Block LB-32 is not held under a granted licence or an executed PSC.
The transaction has been structured to align a significant portion of vendor consideration with key technical and commercial milestones, including independent resource confirmation and farm-out execution. Bounty intends to progress due diligence, title and regulatory work in parallel with the required shareholder and capital raising approvals.
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Source: Bounty Oil & Gas
