By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 06
Namibia priced its future on billions of barrels. TotalEnergies is now sizing Venus down to a first phase, and the windfall with it.
When TotalEnergies confirmed the Venus discovery in the Orange Basin in 2022, Namibia began pricing its future on the promise of billions of barrels. In February 2025 the company started to reset that expectation, sketching a first phase that is deliberately smaller and built in stages. Reporting that the Namibian project may prove smaller than first hoped did not cancel the prize so much as resize it.
The refined concept centres a first phase of roughly 750 million barrels of recoverable oil and about 150,000 barrels a day, trimmed from an earlier target near 160,000, with first oil expected towards the end of the decade. For the national accounts, the question is no longer whether the oil is there but how much of it Phase 1 will actually deliver, and when.
From several billion barrels to a first phase
Early estimates for the wider Venus structure ran into the billions of barrels, and much of Namibia’s public planning absorbed that optimism as if it were bankable. The 2025 recalibration draws a firm line between the resource in the ground and the volume a first, financeable phase will lift. Phase 1 is now framed around 750 million barrels, a serious project by any measure, but a fraction of the headline numbers that circulated after the discovery.
The distinction matters for a small economy. A phased development spreads both the capital and the revenue over a longer horizon, which lowers the near-term windfall while extending the productive life of the field. Namibia is being asked to plan for a steady stream rather than a sudden flood.
The oil has not shrunk; the first cheque has, and the timeline has stretched to match.
The fiscal arithmetic still holds, at a smaller scale
Namibia’s take does not depend on the size of the announcement. The published fiscal terms – a 5 per cent royalty, a 35 per cent petroleum income tax, and the national oil company NAMCOR carrying a 10 per cent stake in the licence – apply to whatever Phase 1 produces. A smaller first phase means smaller absolute receipts, but the structure that converts barrels into public revenue is unchanged.
What a leaner phase does change is the margin for error. With fewer barrels underwriting the early years, the value of the National Upstream Local Content Policy that cabinet approved in late 2024 rises, because every unit of value kept onshore counts for more when the gross flow is smaller.
A smaller pie makes the size of Namibia’s own slice matter more, not less.
The diversification promise, resized
Much of the optimism after 2022 rested on projections that oil could help double the economy within a generation. A phased Venus does not retire that ambition, but it changes its shape from a single leap to a longer climb. Revenue that arrives gradually is harder to squander and easier to absorb, but it also postpones the fiscal room that ministries had begun to assume.
For planners, the discipline is to budget for Phase 1 as it is scoped, not as it was once imagined. Building spending plans on the billions-of-barrels version of Venus would leave the state exposed if later phases move slowly or not at all.
There is a quieter benefit in the resizing. A windfall that lands in stages gives institutions – the treasury, the central bank, the sovereign fund – time to mature before the largest flows arrive. Countries that received their first oil money faster than their rules could handle it rarely look back on the experience kindly, and Namibia now has a reason to build the machinery before the money tests it.
A slower windfall is a harder one to waste, and an easier one to govern.
Why a smaller project can be the more bankable one
A development sized to survive low oil prices is more likely to be built than one that only works at high ones. By trimming Phase 1 to volumes with a clear commercial path and deferring the harder questions to later phases, TotalEnergies is shaping a project that can plausibly reach a final investment decision by the end of 2026. A financeable 750 million barrels beats an unfinanceable several billion.
That is the trade Namibia is being offered. The country gives up the fantasy of an immediate mega-field and receives, in exchange, a better chance that the first phase actually happens on schedule and pays real revenue into the fiscus.
An oil project that reaches a decision is worth more than a larger one that never does.
For a Namibian policymaker or a regional investor reading the 2025 signal, the decision is whether to plan around the field everyone hoped for or the phase TotalEnergies is actually willing to build. Sizing budgets, local-content targets and diversification plans to a 750-million-barrel first phase, rather than to the billions once advertised, is the difference between a windfall the country can manage and one that manages the country.
Sources: Reuters; Orange Basin discoveries and local content (World Oil); TotalEnergies 750-million-barrel project targets first oil in 2030 (Offshore Energy)
