(Sharecast News) - Global Petroleum has successfully raised a total of £1m before costs, it announced on Thursday, to part-fund its new licence commitments.
The AIM-traded firm said the funds were raised through the placing of 200 million shares at a price of 0.5p per share.

As a further component of the placing, 100 million warrants were also being issued at an exercise price of 1p per share for a period of two years, with one warrant for every two new ordinary shares.

If the warrants ended up being exercised in full, associated proceeds would total £1m, with the result that the company would have raised gross proceeds of £2m at a weighted average price of 0.67p per share.

In January, Global announced its updated prospective resources on its Namibian licence PEL0094.

The inclusion of seven new leads, in addition to the Marula and Welwitschia Deep prospects, resulted in a threefold increase to 2,284 million barrels of best estimate, or P50, prospective resources of oil net to Global, confirming its view that the acreage was "highly prospective".

It completed its work commitments under the current licence sub-period "some time ago", with that period expiring in September.

Having done so, the company announced on 10 August that the Ministry of Mines and Energy had agreed to Global's proposal to enter into the next licence sub-period, from September 2021 to September 2022.

The work commitment for the next sub-period would be to acquire and process 2,000 square kilometres of 3D seismic data, a commitment which Global was expecting to fulfil via a farmout.

It said the farmout process was currently underway, adding that the wider context in offshore Namibia exploration was the drilling programme in Namibia's Orange Basin to be undertaken by oil majors Total and Shell.

Both of those wells were expected to spud in the fourth quarter.

The placing would position the company to part-fund the new licence commitments, as well as provide general working capital, including the possible pursuit of other strategic options.

"We are very pleased to have raised further capital, enabling us to continue progress with our exploration activities on PEL0094, and also providing the company with optionality through this exciting period for Namibian offshore exploration," said chief executive officer Peter Hill.

"We are also very happy to welcome new shareholders to the company."

At 1330 BST, shares in Global Petroleum were down 15.83% at 0.51p.