TotalEnergies has signed four Production Sharing Contracts with the Liberia Petroleum Regulatory Authority covering offshore blocks LB 6, LB 11, and two additional blocks in the Liberian Basin, formalising the French major's entry into one of West Africa's least-explored frontier margins. The contracts were executed in Paris on 16 September 2025 and announced by the LPRA the same day.
The signing marks a concrete step beyond the reconnaissance and licensing stages that have long characterised Liberia's offshore sector. PSCs are legally binding instruments that define work obligations, cost-recovery terms, and profit-sharing arrangements between the state and an operator — this is a ratified commercial commitment, not a heads of agreement or a preliminary permit. With four blocks awarded simultaneously to a single super-major, the package represents a meaningful signal of TotalEnergies' appetite for frontier Atlantic-margin acreage at a time when the company continues to expand its African deepwater portfolio.
Liberia's offshore basin sits along the same transform-margin geology that has yielded material discoveries in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire, though the Liberian acreage itself remains largely undrilled at commercial scale. The LPRA has been working to attract investment through revised fiscal terms and regulatory modernisation, and the four-block PSC package with a company of TotalEnergies' technical and financial standing is the most significant contractual outcome that effort has produced to date. The specific work programmes attached to these PSCs — including seismic acquisition commitments and exploration well obligations — were not disclosed in the LPRA announcement.
For the broader West African offshore services market, a TotalEnergies-operated programme across four Liberian blocks has the potential to generate demand across the full exploration and development supply chain. Early-phase work will almost certainly focus on seismic data acquisition and processing before any drilling campaign is scheduled, meaning the procurement cycle for well services and subsea equipment remains some years away. Norwegian service companies with deepwater experience on the Atlantic margin — particularly those already active in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, or Senegal — are well positioned to begin relationship-building now, ahead of any formal tendering process.