UNITED Oil & Gas Plc has now cleared all regulatory hurdles to begin its first physical exploration work offshore Jamaica, after receiving the final permit required to collect seabed samples in a basin it believes could hold significant oil and gas resources.

The London-listed company announced on Tuesday that it had been granted a “beach licence” by Jamaican authorities. This permit authorises UOG to conduct a piston core survey, a process that extracts sediment from the ocean floor, within its vast Walton Morant licence area to test for the presence of oil and gas.

This latest approval completes a key permitting phase that began earlier this year. On July 24, 2025, the company formally received a five-year environmental permit from the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA), which approved the plan for a suite of non-invasive surveys.

Together, these permits allow UOG to launch a technical programme aimed at de-risking the prospect — a process of gathering critical data to reduce the geological and financial uncertainty of the project. The planned seabed sampling will search for direct chemical evidence of hydrocarbons, providing tangible clues about the potential for oil and gas reserves deep below. This information is a crucial step in the company’s strategy to attract a partner to share the substantial costs and risks of future operations. Positive results from the sampling are expected to be a key factor in securing a farm-in deal for the expensive process of drilling an exploratory well.

“The granting of the beach licence marks another important step forward in our efforts to unlock the potential of the Walton Morant Basin,” said Chief Executive Brian Larkin. “Seabed sampling will provide valuable geochemical insights…this progress helps make the asset even more attractive to potential farm-in partners.”

The Walton Morant licence is a 22,400 km² offshore exploration block off Jamaica’s southern coast. While undrilled and frontier in nature, it is a data-rich asset, with extensive seismic coverage having identified over 21 prospects and leads. This work has defined a significant unrisked resource potential of over 2.4 billion barrels of high-grade prospects, and over seven billion barrels in total. It is crucial to note that “unrisked prospective resources” are an estimate of potentially recoverable oil before accounting for the significant chance of geological failure; they represent an upside potential, not a discovered volume. The geological setting shares similarities with the prolific basins of Guyana and Trinidad, providing a compelling model for its potential.

The upcoming seabed sampling work is a targeted effort to de-risk these specific, mapped prospects. By searching for direct chemical traces of hydrocarbons that may have seeped from the deep reservoirs identified on seismic data, UOG aims to gather tangible evidence to improve the chance of success for future, much more expensive drilling operations.

CEO Larkin had previously noted that commercial discussions with potential partners were already underway and “progressing in parallel” to the survey preparations, indicating that the project has garnered industry interest even before this new data is collected.

The company has not announced a specific timeline for the survey operation to begin. Following its completion, the geochemical analysis of the samples will take several weeks, and the results will be a key determinant for the company’s decision on whether to proceed to the drilling phase for oil and gas in Jamaican waters.

LARKIN…the granting of the beach licence marks another important step forward in our efforts to unlock the potential of the Walton Morant Basin.