On Friday, the Libyan-Tunisian Joint Oil Exploration, Exploitation and Petroleum Services Company (Joint Oil) announced the schedule of a new bid round for exploration and development of offshore acreage in the Gabes-Tripoli Basin, the cross-border zone the two countries jointly administer in the central Mediterranean.
The round, run with strategic advisor Moyes & Co, opens on 7 September 2026 and runs through 31 December 2026.
Schedule
- September 7, 2026: Bid round opens; qualified offshore operators can apply for access to the Virtual Data Room.
- September 9, 2026: Joint Oil presents the opportunity at the MMEA Scout Group meeting in London.
- September 29-30, 2026: Joint Oil presents at the World Energy Summit in London.
- December 31, 2026: Bid round closes.
- January 8, 2027: Bid submissions due.
- February 26, 2027: Winning bidders notified.
- April 30, 2027: Formal awards expected.
The round covers two distinct packages. The first offers further exploration across the wider 3,000-square-kilometre Joint Oil Block, in water depths of 80-120 metres, backed by 6,500km of 2D and 1,900 square kilometres of 3D seismic data and a run of legacy wells dating to 1976.
The second covers development of the Zarat discovery specifically – a gas-condensate reservoir straddling the boundary between Tunisia’s national acreage and the jointly-held Joint Oil Block, requiring a stacked framework of unitisation and operating agreements to allow both sides to develop the shared reservoir together.
Zarat was discovered by Marathon in 1992 and is estimated to hold around 0.4 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas and 50 million barrels of liquids. A previous development concept centred on a roughly USD 1 billion mobile production unit tied back to the nearby Miskar platform. Despite this, the field has remained undeveloped for over three decades, held back chiefly by its high CO2 content, and Joint Oil – a 50:50 venture between Tunisia’s ETAP and Libya’s Ola Energy Holdings – has run bid rounds for the acreage before without success, including as recently as late 2023.