On 30 October 2018 Hellenic Hydrocarbon Resources Management (HHRM) disclosed its plan to offer five new offshore explorations blocks located in the Ionian Sea, to the south of the Peloponnese and to the south of Crete to interested companies in 2019. The blocks will extend over areas ranging from 8,000 sq km to 22,000 sq km in the Apulian and Pre-Apulian zones (offshore Western Greece) as well as in the frontier Mediterranean Ridge area further south. The licensing authority also stated that it had completed the reprocessing of the seismic data available for the area.  The acreage to be offered roughly consist of the offshore zones that remained unlicensed following the Second International Licensing Round (2014) and the three 2017-2018 tenders for the Ionian block (Repsol/Hellenic Petroleum) and the west Crete and southwest Crete blocks (Total/ExxonMobil/Hellenic Petroleum). Exploration targets in the Apulian and pre-Apulian zones are Late Cretaceous - Eocene carbonates overlain by a thick Oligocene shale seal and Mio-Pliocene clastics on top (analogous to the productive fractured carbonate reservoirs of the central Adriatic offshore Italy and Albania), while the main objectives in the frontier Mediterranean Ridge area are Miocene carbonate build-ups, analogous to the recent discoveries made in the eastern Mediterranean Sea (Zohr). 12,000 km of multi-client 2D seismic were acquired by Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) in late 2012 - early 2013 over an area extending from the Albanian and Italian borders to the south of Crete ahead of the Second International Licensing Round.
Hellenic Hydrocarbon Resources Management (HHRM) disclosed its plan to offer five new offshore explorations blocks located in the Ionian Sea, to the south of the Peloponnese and to the south of Crete to interested companies in 2019. The blocks will extend over areas ranging from 8,000 sq km to 22,000 sq km in the Apulian and Pre-Apulian zones (offshore Western Greece) as well as in the frontier 