APA has a 50% working interest in the block where the oil discovery was made, with TotalEnergies the operator and the holder of the remaining stake.

The discovery is close to a massive oil field found by an Exxon Mobil Corp led consortium in Guyana, that was estimated to hold nearly 11 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

The APA-Total joint-venture is at present drilling the Dikkop exploration well in the center of Block 58.

(Reporting by Rithika Krishna in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)