Page 8 - AfrElec Week 45

AfrElec P O L I C Y AfrElec
Total seen gearing up to sell 12.5% stake in OML 118
NIGERIA
FRANCE’S Total is reportedly looking to unload its minority stake in OML 118, a deepwater field located offshore Nigeria.
Industry and banking sources told Reuters last week that the company had decided to sell its 12.5% holding in the field, which was for- merly known as Bonga, as part of a wider effort to adjust its portfolio of African assets to support an expansion programme. Under this programme, Total is set to divest $5bn worth of assets in vari- ous regions around the world by the end of next year.
Reuters’ sources did not say when Total hoped to finalise the sell-off. They did state, though, that the French company’s stake in OML 118 could fetch up to $750mn. Additionally, they said that Rothschild investment bank had agreed to man- age the sale process.
As of press time, neither Total nor the bank had confirmed the report.
Bonga lies 120km offshore from the Niger River Delta region. It was first discovered in
1996, and Nigeria’s government approved inves- tors’ development plans in 2002.
The field then came on stream in 2005. At its peak, it was yielding about 225,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil and 1.55bn cubic metres per year of natural gas.
OML 118 is believed to hold around 6bn bar- rels of oil and also contains sizeable gas reserves. Equity in the project is split 55% to Royal Dutch Shell (UK/Netherlands), 20% to ExxonMobil (US) and 12.5% to Total and Eni (Italy). Shell and ExxonMobil are serving as joint operators of the field.
Earlier this year, Nigeria’s national oil com- pany (NOC) said it had invited several potential investors to submit bids for an adjacent deepwa- ter field known as Bonga South West/Aparao. This site is set to see oil production reach a peak of 225,000 bpd in 2022. Nigerian National Petro- leum Corp. (NNPC) will lead the project, which is likely to see output peak at 225,000 bpd, jointly with Shell.™
PROJECT NEWS
Uganda tests tertiary recovery methods
UGANDA
THE Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU) has launched a pilot programme that involves using tertiary recovery methods to increase yields at crude oil deposits.
Bob Felix Ocitti, a senior petroleum geoscien- tist at PAU, said earlier this week that his agency was testing polymer flooding and other meth- ods in a laboratory setting. Officials in Kampala hope that these tests will help determine whether investors can ensure that Ugandan fields yield all 1.4bn barrels of the oil that has been classified as recoverable reserves, he said during a visit to the Lake Albert region.
“There are other tertiary methods such as polymer flooding that will help us produce even more than what we currently have [estimated] as 1.4bn barrels. We have done some laboratory tests based on that methodology,” he was quoted as saying by the Daily Monitor.
Eventually, Ocitti added, PAU intends to test tertiary recovery methods such as polymer flooding at oil-bearing sites in the Lake Albert region. The agency will work with the companies that have development licences for the country’s oilfields before they begin commercial produc- tion, he said.
“That is why we have planned as govern- ment together with the operators to do a pilot
test of polymer flooding,” he explained. “Already we have done the laboratory tests, [and] they look promising. But for you to make a full-field deployment, you must have attained a successful pilot project.”
He did not say when PAU and its partners expected to begin field testing.
Ocitti also commented on long-standing rumours that Uganda’s national oil company (NOC) was exporting crude oil extracted from Lake Albert fields during test production pro- grammes to Kenya.
He dismissed these reports, saying that all 45,000 barrels of the crude gathered from wells in the Hoima and Buliisa districts since 2012 were still in storage.
These volumes have remained in contain- ers at the Kasemene-1, Kasemene-2, Njiri and Warindi oilfields, and Ugandan authorities are willing to shoulder the cost of keeping them there, he said.
“We used to flare this oil, but because we are environmentally friendly, the government, together with the oil companies, decided not to flare anymore and instead started to store this crude oil and in turn sell it off and earn some monetary value from it,” he was quoted as saying by the Observer.™
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 45 14•November•2019