TotalEnergies Targets 2026 FID on Venus — Namibia's First Deepwater Oil Project

TotalEnergies' Venus discovery in the Orange Basin off Namibia's southern coast is progressing toward a final investment decision in 2026, and would become Namibia's first deepwater oil development if approved. Venus was announced in 2022 as one of the largest offshore oil finds of the decade anywhere in the world. Subsequent appraisal drilling has confirmed the resource at commercial scale, and engineering studies have narrowed the likely development concept to a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel tied to subsea wells at water depths exceeding 2,000 metres. A positive FID in 2026 would trigger a build-out programme spanning roughly four to five years, with first oil targeted in the early 2030s. The capital scale of such a project runs into the tens of billions of US dollars over its life cycle, and the fiscal terms negotiated with government will determine how much of that value lands inside Namibia. The local content conversation is already under way. The Ministry of Mines and Energy and NIPDB have been working with TotalEnergies on a local participation framework that covers supply chains, training, and Namibian equity participation via NAMCOR. The devil is in the detail: meaningful local content in offshore oil is harder to achieve than in onshore mining because so much of the supply chain is specialised and globally consolidated. Environmental scrutiny is rising in parallel. Civil society groups have pointed to the Benguela Current marine ecosystem, Namibia's fishing industry in the overlapping waters, and the long-tailed climate implications of a new oil basin coming online in the 2030s. How government and TotalEnergies navigate these concerns through 2026 will shape the social licence going into construction.