Africa Oil climbs as Kenya well starts trial output3:10 pm by Mourad Haroutunian

All tested zones produced dry oil with no water produced and no pressure depletion, the company said.

Africa Oil Corp. (CVE:AOI), a Canadian oil and gas company with assets in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, said the Ngamia-1 oil discovery on Block 10BB is estimated to produce 5,400 barrels of oil per day, or boepd, after it had produced 3,200 boepd during the testing period.

The operator, Tullow Oil plc (LON:TLW), a U.K. oil and gas explorer, believes the Ngamia and Twiga fields contain over 250 million barrels of recoverable oil and that the test results confirm that this East African country now has a commercial petroleum system, the Vancouver, British Colombia-based company said in a statement on Tuesday.

All tested zones produced dry oil with no water produced and no pressure depletion, the company said.

The firm net oil pay estimate in the Ngamia well has now doubled to over 200 meters over a gross oil column of over 1,100 meters and has increased the net pay at Twiga to over 75 meters, according to the statement.

“The Ngamia-1 testing program which has confirmed the productivity of both the Lower Lokhone reservoir and the high quality Auwerwer reservoir,” Chief Executive Officer Keith Hill said in the statement. “These results move us towards achieving the threshold for a commercial development in the Lokichar basin,” he added.

Shares of Africa Oil gained 2.2 percent to C$6.84 at 1:23 p.m. in Toronto on Tuesday, giving the company a market value of C$1.73 billion. The shares have lost 2.2 percent so far this year, compared with a 28.5 percent loss for the junior S&P/TSX Venture Composite Index(CVE: