Southern Africa’s exploration circles are abuzz with talk of Shell achieving super-charged oil flow rates from production tests it has been running on its ground-breaking Graff-1x discovery well offshore Namibia.

Namibia is probably the world’s top exploration hot spot, as two discoveries by Shell — Graff and Jonker — and TotalEnergies’ Venus find pave the way for a surge of industry interest in the long-neglected Orange basin and set the scene for what could be at least three major projects.