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DMEA PiPelines DMEA
CNPC starts building Niger-Benin oil pipeline
afRiCa
CHINA National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) is working to establish a new transportation route that will allow it to export the oil it produces in Niger.
According to the press office of Nigerien Pres- ident Mahamadou Issoufou, China National Oil and gas exploration and Development Corp. (CNOgeDC), a subsidiary of state-owned CNPC, began work last week on a 90,000 bar- rel per day (bpd) pipeline connecting the Aga- dem oilfield in Niger to south-eastern Benin. It marked the start of construction in a ceremony at the Agadem field, with President Issoufou attending.
When finished, the pipeline will follow a 2,000-km route from south-eastern Niger to Seme, a port near the border between Benin and Nigeria. The Benin section of the link will be 687 km long. CNPC will have to spend $4.5bn to build the pipeline, which is due to be completed by the end of 2021.
CNPC began extracting crude oil from Aga- dem in 2011. In 2015, members of Boko Haram,
a Nigerian Islamist group, began staging attacks on the field and other oil infrastructure in the Diffa region of south-eastern Niger. Concerns about security came to a head last November, after Boko Haram crossed the border into Niger and killed eight members of a drilling team employed by the French company Foraco.
Niger’s government responded quickly, ini- tialing an agreement with Benin in January 2019 on the construction of a new pipeline to Seme. CNPC then concluded a deal on September 15, when Nigerien Oil Minister Foumakoye gado and CNOgeDC’s president Wang Zhong Cai signed an agreement on the project in Niamey.
The Chinese company had been considering an alternative export route – namely, a shorter and cheaper pipeline through Chad and Cam- eroon that would have terminated in the deep- water port of Kribi. It even signed an agreement with the government of Cameroon on this pro- ject in 2013. The parties never launched con- struction, however, largely because of tensions between CNPC and the government of Chad.
SOMO denies having received Saudi request for crude
middle east
AN official from the State Organization for the Marketing of Oil (SOMO) denied that it had received a request from Saudi Arabia for crude for the latter’s refineries.
Iraqi state media this week quoted SOMO’s head of public relations, Haidar al-Kaabi, as say- ing that SOMO “categorically denies any request from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to supply it with crude”.
The comment follows reports last week from the Wall Street Journal and S&P global Platts, which quoted sources as saying that riyadh had asked Iraq for up to 20mn barrels of crude to fill the gap cause by last weekend’s drone and mis- sile attack on the Khurais oilfield and processing facilities at Abqaiq.
Saudi officials were quoted during the week as saying that Saudi Aramco would restore the 5.7mn barrels per day (bpd) of lost crude pro- duction by the end of September, without having to cancel any shipments to customers.
Iraq moves the vast majority of its crude exports through the Al Başrah Oil Terminal
(ABOT) and the Khor al-Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT) in the south, though loading at the lat- ter has been shut in since a pipe rupture caused leaks in 2017.
Iraq’s 2019 state budget, passed by the National Assembly in January, calls for the Kurdistan regional government (Krg) to allow 250,000 bpd of the territory’s crude to be sold by SOMO at the Turkish port of Ceyhan, with a chunk of the authority’s allocation of federal funds being contingent on this.
Iraq has held lofty ambitions of ramping up oil output to a level that would challenge Saudi Arabia, but these have been hampered by two significant obstacles: a lack of export infrastruc- ture and a lack of water for injection.
Baghdad’s recent statement of intent to proceed with the long-awaited crude conduit through Jordan to the red Sea, the seawater line deal with Hyundai in June and these reports of progress on a deal to improve facilities to ABOT and KAAOT demonstrate that Iraq is trying to remove the most significant barriers.
teRminals & shiPPinG
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 38 26•September•2019
