SOEKOR's Karoo exploration drilling, 1960s-70s, and the uranium prospecting that followed
reference · consulted 2026-08-01
- Type
- reference
- Repository
- Council for Geoscience (Karoo Deep Drilling Project); SAJS, 'Deflating the shale gas potential of South Africa's Main Karoo basin'; Karoo Space
- Consulted
- 2026-08-01
The citation as it was given
WHO WAS DRILLING IN THE KAROO, and when. SOEKOR - the Southern Oil Exploration Corporation, a South African parastatal - put down about TWENTY DEEP WELLS in the mid to late 1960s across an area larger than Germany, looking for oil. Boreholes carry designations like KL1/65, WE1/66, SW1/67, SP1/69. They did not find economic oil. In 1967 a SOEKOR crew lost drilling fluid at about 2,400 m on Skietfontein near Aberdeen. | THE SECOND WAVE: SOEKOR's boreholes intersected anomalous URANIUM in 1967, and prospecting for sandstone-hosted uranium in the Main Karoo Basin ran from 1969 to 1985 - ESSO trial-mined into the late 1970s and Beaufort West was spoken of as a future mining town. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl collapsed the price and it stopped. | TERTIARY, and gathered specifically to date a drill bit lying on Rondabel. See LEAD-0051.
Kept verbatim. This project contradicts published genealogies and corrects a family's own oral tradition, so every claim has to be checkable by someone who was not in the room.