Page 7 - AfrOil Week 03 2020

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 Block 29 went to a consortium headed by France’s Total. The group is split between Total, with 46%; Equinor (Norway), with 24.5%; Sonangol, with 20%, and BP (UK), with 9.5%.
Sonangol also reported success in its bid- ding for Block 28. As a result, the NOC is set to acquire a 20% stake in the site, while Italy’s Eni will secure a 60% stake and operatorship of the project. The remaining 20% of equity is still unassigned, and the partners have said they are willing to assign the stake to investors that are able to support work at the block.
Meanwhile, Sonangol is still the only party committed to Block 27. It will take a 35% stake in the site and is making the remaining 65% of equity available for interested parties.
The NOC has not said when or where it wants to begin discussions with companies
that are considering joining the Block 29 and 28 projects. It has noted, though, that all three licence areas lie within a frontier province and are not yet in production. Sonangol and its part- ners will therefore have to carry out exploration programmes to determine whether they con- tain commercial hydrocarbon reserves.
Six of the other seven blocks included in the licensing round lie within the Namibe Basin: Blocks 43, 42, 41, 13, 12 and 11. The last site, known as Block 10, lies within the Benguela Basin.
Angola’s government has said it hopes that the blocks offered to investors in the licensing round will hold enough oil to help boost oil pro- duction. The African state has seen yields drop below 1.4mn barrels per day (bpd) over the last 10 years, a fall of more than 33%.remarked.™
PERFORMANCE
Agogo oilfield comes
on stream offshore Angola
ANGOLA
ANGOLA’S National Agency for Oil, Gas and Biofuels, known as ANPG, said last week that Italy’s Eni had begun extracting crude oil from Agogo, a field that lies within the offshore Block 15/06. Eni confirmed the agency’s announce- ment, saying in a statement dated January 17 that the deepwater field had come on stream.
According to ANPG, oil began flowing from Agogo-1, a well drilled in 1,700-metre-deep water, on January 16. The agency reported initial production rates at 10,000 barrels per day (bpd) and said that yields were likely to rise to 20,000 bpd within the next few weeks.
The Italian company is using tie-backs to connect Agogo-1 back to the N’Goma floating production, storage and off-loading (FPSO) vessel anchored at Block 15/06. The N’Goma FPSO’s current location is about 15 km away from the well.
Agogo is the largest oil deposit discovered in Angola in many years. Preliminary estimates show that the field may contain more than 650mn barrels of oil in place (OIP). Eni has said it hopes to find more crude and revise the reserve estimate upwards accordingly via the drilling of delineation wells. It is already con- fident of further upside, following the drilling of Agogo-2, an appraisal well completed in July 2019.
Eni worked quickly to bring the field into production. In its statement, the Italian com- pany noted that Agogo had come on line in record time, just nine months after discov- ery in March 2019. It also asserted that this achievement highlighted the effectiveness of
its fast-track model for the development of new finds. This model is based on maximising the value of projects by using existing infrastructure to exploit operational synergies, it said.
Equity in Block 15/06 is split between Eni, the operator, with 36.8421%; Sonangol P&P, an affiliate of the national oil company (NOC) Sonangol, with 36.8421%, and SSI Fifteen Ltd (Angola), with 26.3158%. The partners discov- ered Agogo after launching an exploration pro- gramme at the block in the second half of 2018. That programme led to the discovery of no less than five new fields that contain around 2bn bar- relsofOIP.™
Agogo is in the north-west corner of Block 15/06 (Image: Eni)
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