Dutch geoscientist, oil drilling specialist, and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Geoexpro has raised imperative questions about Gambia’s oil prospectivity, shady conclusions by Australian FAR Ltd., that later sold off its shares to Woodside Energy at a tune of $126 million lifetime, as well as a guaranteed future remuneration of $55 million—moneys FAR Ltd., made off of Gambia after announcing earlier the tiny West African nation had over 800 million barrel hopes. The drilled wells in The Gambia were later declared “dry” and quickly sealed, with the Australian company not releasing any data on geological porosity, permeability, well logs, seismic information, and pressure points—these being basic information in any transparent oil exploration. Mr. Kombrink was talking to us in an exclusive interview Thursday, June 12^th 2025. You can listen to the interview here on forGambia by clicking on the black play button at top far right corner of your page for desktop users. Cellphones and other mobile device users can scroll down to find the same play button at the end of the article. Follow part one of the interview below:

FORGAMBIA: Good morning. It’s morning over here in The United States, Central Time. Thank you for joining for Gambia newspaper and radio right now, and I thank you for accepting our invitation to talk to us.

HENK: No problem.

FORGAMBIA: I read your article [OIL DOES NOT CARE ABOUT BOUNDARIES] with great interest. It is wonderfully written, well researched. Anybody who understands English, going through that, you would see, that this is well written and well presented. I think it is up to us, Gambians, to receive it the way we should. It is up to us to accord it the respect it deserves. So, can you please introduce yourself to Gambians? Who you are, what’s your background, and what do you do?

HENK: Yes. Of course. Thanks, Ebrima, for the invite. So, my name is Henk Kombrink, and, I actually, I never had the intention to become a writer or a journalist, because my background is in geology. I studied in The Netherlands, actually. I am Dutch, and then, worked for the geological survey for a few years, then moved to Aberdeen in Scotland where I still am, and worked in the oil industry for a number of years. But the oil industry is a cyclical industry with lots of booms and busts. And, when the COVID pandemic started in 2020, I was made redundant. And as a consequence of that, I started looking for other things to do. And that’s how a kind of this opportunity came along to start writing for a website, and then that, kind of, culminated into becoming the editor for a magazine. And we write about the energy sector, oil and gas, but also geothermal energy, etc., and all of that from a subsurface, below ground perspective, from a geological perspective. And in that capacity, I am writing a lot of articles about things that are happening worldwide in oil and gas, like I said, and then other things.

FORGAMBIA: Thank you very much. So, like I said, your article was fantastic. Why did you feel the need to write that article? What motivated you to write that article about “Oil does not care about boundaries”? What a caption! What motivated you to write that article? Why?

HENK: Because it was actually someone from your country who got in touch with me about this. He called me up and said, he’s based in London, and he wanted… well, we had a discussion about this Sangomar field. And that sparked my interest, and I looked a bit into it myself. I will not claim that I am an expert on the whole history at all. But it did spark my interest and looking at the outline of this field and how it kind of almost stops at the boundary between the maritime boundary between Senegal and The Gambia, I thought, okay, well, what is going on here? Is this a coincidence or not? And that, kind of, was the trigger to look a bit more into this. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much.

FORGAMBIA: So, I also watched and listened to the Australian FAR Limited managing director. I think her name is Cath Norman, who unequivocally stated that “you can clearly see, and I’m quoting, that the Sangomar oil fields extend south into the Gambia.” She said, “in fact, the location of the planned Bambo-1 well is 500 meters from the border to the south, drilling into the extension of the Sangoma field, that we call the solo prospect.”

HENK: Yeah.

FORGAMBIA: So if that is the case, geologically, do you think that oil will skip the Gambian territory and then skip to Guinea Bissau if you look at the the geography of the area? What is your take, based on what just I just quoted from her statements?

HENK: Yes. Exactly. And this was another thing that  triggered me, obviously, to write this because FAR was seemingly quite confident that Sangomar, the oil field itself, the accumulation, did extend into The Gambia. And they presented in their press releases, in their company presentations. These companies always, they kind of provide sketches of how the subsurface looks like, how this oil field actually extended southwards in this case. And as you say, they were quite confident and their company partners as well that the oil field did extend into The Gambia. And that was the main driver for these two wells to be drilled. And then, of course, it is drilling wells— always a risk. You never know what you will be finding until you actually drill the well. And as geoscientists, that is something really important to convey. Before you actually drill the well, you complete it, you don’t know what you will find. There’s always a risk involved that you won’t find the result that you are after. But still, these two wells both, they’re called Samo and Bambo. And Bambo is, as you say, very close to the boundary, the maritime boundary. Both wells were reported to be, well, we could call them dry. So, and that means no oil. But it’s really the subsequent release of information that is quite sparse. And that led me to just question, like, okay. What is really the basis of this? What is the real proof that these wells did not find any oil? And then to this day, I still don’t know. The article I wrote was really to put that question out there. What has happened? And even if the wells were really dry, and they didn’t find anything, I still want to put the question out there. Okay, is the boundary, the Sangomar Field really not extending into Gambian waters at all? I don’t think that you can definitely prove that, even with this well, Bambo, which is very close because that’s only just one location that was tested. And I think that question is still out there.

FORGAMBIA: Thank you. So, did you make any attempts at reaching to FAR limited, for some answers?

HENK: No.

FORGAMBIA: Okay.

HENK: Because that is, no. I didn’t go as far as that. Okay. I must say, for me, the article was really to put the question out there. And, I must admit that there is, I think, more work to do, in order to find out, okay, what exactly does this field boundary now tell us? Is it 100% sure that it doesn’t extend into the Gambia? And I am not a 100% sure about that. And that’s what is reflected in the title of the article I wrote.

FORGAMBIA: Wonderful. So, if you would put this mathematically, Senegal is drilling [oil]. It is a done deal that Senegal has oil in their Sangmar field, which is very close to Gambia. So, if you would come up with just a mathematical number, it is 100% true that Senegal has it. What figure can you give based on your instincts and your background and your article? Would you give Gambia a 50% chance of having oil, a 90%, or what mathematical number would you, kind of, instinctively suggest that Gambia’s prospectivity stands at?

HENK: Yeah. I that is a tricky question. Because the problem here is, okay, that there is like, these wells, they all, I think they did prove that oil has been migrating through the subsurface. So, in that sense, you can say that 100%. If you would drill there again, it’s quite likely you will find traces of oil and gas. The question is, is there oil and gas trapped in a structure to an extent that we can produce it economically? And that’s where the risk comes in because the area has seen migration of oil and gas because oil and gas migrate through the subsurface over time. And the and the trick is to find it in traps where it kind of accumulates and sits in a reservoir, waiting to be discovered. And that is if you would want me to put a risk or a probability on that, I find that really difficult because I didn’t really look at that in enough detail to kind of put a number on that. But what I would say, this, the boundary of the Sangomar Field as it is now appearing on maps, with the southern boundary really lining up with the maritime boundary between Senegal and Gambia, to me that still looks a bit odd. And it warrants more, of an investigation, I think.

FORGAMBIA: Thank you. So, do you think exploration in both Senegal and Gambia requiring two separate licenses would force companies like FAR Limited to hide Gambia’s prospectivity, you know, especially considering the fact that, (according to, Mr. Ousman Mbai, I read his article too, it’s very interesting) FAR Ltd., exited on the very opaque circumstances according to Mr. Mbai. I’m quoting here. So, “after receiving a lifetime payment of a 126,000,000 US dollars from Woodside Energy while failing to release crucial drilling data from both blocks to the Gambia.” I think that will be the Bambo and the Samo blocks. They also received a 126,000,000 million US dollars lifetime payment and an extra 55,000,000 million Dollars guaranteed future payment from Woodside Energy. Probably you’ve already read the article. It’s brilliantly written. Do you think FAR would receive such a whopping sum of money if Gambia’s prospectivity was really low and useless?

HENK: Well, yeah. I honestly, I think there is a lot at play here. The only thing that I included in this article that I wrote is that I guess there is potential here for something that happened. Well, let’s put it this way. If an oil field treadles a national boundary, if, let’s say, Sangomar would extend into the Gambia, you would need an agreement between both Senegal and Gambia for, okay, to determine how much, what is the share of the oil that is in Gambian waters, and what is the share of the oil in this field in Senegalese waters. So, you need an agreement between these two countries, because often with fields like this, you would only produce from a platform in one of either one, country or the other. So, you need to determine, okay, how much of that produced oil actually belongs to Gambia. So, that and these processes, it’s called unitization. They (these processes) always take a long time. And it really depends on how well these countries kind of communicate and collaborate on that, how easy that is established. And given that FAR had an interest both in Senegal and in Gambia, just that observation might create a situation where okay, FAR was incentivized to share, to sell their stake in Senegal. And maybe there was an arrangement like, okay, we by doing that, by accepting that money, what happened then as a condition on their Gambian license? And that is the question that I put in the article. I don’t have the answer to that. I did not investigate it further, and that’s Ousman, who is looking into that a bit more. But you can see that there is a situation where there could be a lack of transparency.

FORGAMBIA: Great. Thank you. So, you also wrote, in fact, the company even seem to be of the opinion that the Sangoma and Samo structures might share the same contact, potentially increasing the size of the field significantly. So, it is probably this concept that determine the order in which the two wells that FAR and Petronas subsequently planned in The Gambia were drilled. Can you elaborate on this given the fact that you might have heard recently that Gambia’s former president stated unequivocally that Senegal has been siphoning Gambia’s oil. So, he made such a serious allegation. I contacted the Senegalese government through their embassy, and they promised to get back to me. They still haven’t. Senegal hasn’t released after that time, and this is very recent these days, they haven’t released any official statement about those allegations. And I am not a geological expert. I’m not, I don’t have even an iota of a background in the oil industry or in the oil field. But if you look at those maps and you read your article and you listen to other experts, it is gonna be very, very unlikely that such allegations would just go like that without creating some real suspicion. Not even [just] suspicion, there’s some plausibility of oil availability, in the Gambian offshores. If you look at the line in that subregion, every country has it. And Senegal signed, I think not just an MOU, they have like, maybe unitization. I’m not sure if you say unitization with Mauritania, but they signed some deals. They have some deals with Mauritania. But when it comes to Gambia, I know Senegal and I know Gambia, the two countries. We are the same, you know, the Europeans kind of drew the borderlines. But, we know how we tarry with the Senegalese. Some of them, [especially] their politicians left them alone, would just annex Gambia. That [thought] has been going on for a long time. Now given these oil prospects, Macky Sall having a background in, you know, he was, I think, oil and petroleum minister in Senegal before becoming president. So, they were able to strike a deal with Mauritania. But when it came to Gambia, they skipped Gambia. This is something that is, I think, worthy of further investigation. But coming back to what I just quoted from you, can you please elaborate on this interconnectivity? I read just a little bit about, porosity and permeability. And then these people FAR limited, never released any data regarding porosity, permeability, and all the other, variables that are very, very significant to any drilling. Can you please tell us more?

HENK: Yes. So, as you mentioned the oil water contact, and then I think that is an important thing to start off with, because you imagine, an oil field we call, if we say this is an oil field, what we mean is like imagine in your mind, like a dome. And this dome, that is a layer basically, a layer of sand, about two, three kilometers depth. And in that dome and overlying that dome, it is other types of rocks, and it’s mostly finer grained. It’s called we call it a shield or a mudstone. And if oil migrating into that dome, into the sandstone, because there is pores, pore space between the  tiny little grains, and that’s where the oil accumulates. It wants to move up because it’s lighter than water, but it’s the finer grain, it’s the mudstone that is on top that prevents the oil from moving up any further. And then when it does this dome structure is filled, at some point, the oil will be full, and then it creates a contact between the water that is below it and an oil above. And that is what we call an oil water contact. And in many cases, that is a flat line. And so what FAR anticipated is that this contact, which has been found in Sangomar in Senegal, is this field is so big that this contact extends into Gambia. And that is the very thing that was tested by these two wells, Samo and Bambo. And Samo was drilled and that probably because that’s the well that is furthest south.

And the reason why that was done, probably, is that if they would have proven the oil water contact there in that location, then automatically, it would have proven quite a big volume of oil in Gambia that possibly extended all the way from there to Sangomar in Senegal. Apparently, that well did not find the oil, and, subsequently, the Bambo well was drilled, which is a lot closer to Sangomar. But even though that well was so close, and based, if you plot it on a map, you would you might think, oh, it’s so close to Sangomar. It’s probably going to find the contact or at least some oil. Apparently, it didn’t. And that’s what we are up against. But like I said, the subsequent press releases do not really [sic] there is not enough data to really say, okay, this is definitely not, this was not successful. I would as a geoscientist, I would like to see a bit more supporting evidence of that. And that was the point of the article.

Please read Henk Kombrink’s article on Gambia titled, “OIL DOES NOT CARE ABOUT BOUNDARIES,” here:

Oil does not care about boundaries

Part Two of our interview coming soon!