Challenger banks on Uruguayan frontier

The independent is poised to benefit from the new wave of interest in Uruguayan acreage

Uruguay has “all of the technical merits but none of the issues”, says Eytan Uliel, CEO of AIM-listed independent Challenger Energy. The frontier country “has, in a short space of time, become a focal point of the whole business”, Uliel says, adding there is significant potential for “value uplift” there. Challenger was the only applicant when it opted to bid for a Uruguayan licence in May 2020, but the block “was very big, offshore and in shallow water”, with historic, 2D seismic data available. “No one had really paid much attention to it” he adds. It was two years before Uruguay’s president formally approved the licence—which therefore started in August this year—but during that time the