Page 6 - AfrOil Week 41 2019

AfrOil INVESTMENT AfrOil
 Reuters also quoted Mayadou Faye, the manag- ing director of Senegal’s national oil company (NOC) Petrosen, as saying that he hoped the licensing round would lead to the signing of contracts for 10-12 offshore blocks. Once the bidding opens, Dakar will be accepting offers for a period of six months, he said on the sidelines of the same conference.
Faye also said in a speech at the conference that Senegal hoped to draw attention to new upstream oil and gas development opportuni- ties, as well as LNG and gas-to-power projects, at a special event next year. Africa Oil & Power
will host the first Senegal Oil & Power confer- ence on May 28-28, 2020, he stated.
Senegal has recently reported several major gas discoveries in the offshore zone, near the border with Mauritania. BP (UK) and Kosmos Energy (US) have found sizeable reserves at Grand Tortue-Ahmeyim and Yaakar-Teranga and hope to use these fields to support two LNG projects.
Meanwhile, Woodside Energy (Australia), Cairn Energy (UK) and FAR Ltd (Australia) are planning to extract both crude oil and natural gas from the SNE licence area. ™
PERFORMANCE
Nigerian minister may have spilled the beans about OPEC quota hike
NIGERIA
OPEC appears to have granted Nigeria a higher production quota without announcing its deci- sion, and Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petro- leum Resources Timipre Sylva may have been the first to make the information public.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Sylva said his country was ready to work harder to remain in compliance with OPEC’s quota system.
He stated that the group had set Nigeria’s quota at 1.774mn barrels per day (bpd) and acknowledged that production had exceeded this figure in August of this year. (OPEC’s estimates indicate that the African country extracted 1.866mn bpd in that month.)
The minister’s words were notable, given that the cartel announced in July that it had set Nigeria’s quota at 1.685mn bpd and then never made a public statement to the effect that it had decided to raise the production ceiling. But three OPEC delegates familiar with the mat- ter told Reuters last week that the group had indeed revised the quota.
According to these sources, the group has fixed Nigeria’s oil production quota at 1.774mn bpd, the same level cited by Sylva. “It’s hap- pened,” one of the delegates told the news agency. “I’ve not heard of any other changes to the agreement.”
One source said that OPEC had agreed to raise the limit because Nigeria has brought a large new field on stream this year – Egina, operated by France’s Total. When the group first set a target for Nigeria, it did not consider out- put from this new field, which yielded first oil in January of this year, he explained.
Nigerian officials have been lobbying OPEC not to include the 200,000 bpd flowing from Egina when measuring its output. They argue that production streams from the new field are light enough for them to be classified as con- densate and not crude oil.
OPEC has been pushing its member states to adhere more closely to the quota system. Last week, the government of Gabon pledged to work towards compliance. In a telephone call with Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, Gabon’s Oil and Gas Minister Noel Mboumba said he was ready to take this step.
The cartel recently estimated that Gabon had extracted about 199,000 bpd of oil in Sep- tember of this year, nearly 10% above its pro- duction ceiling of 181,000 bpd. ™
Nigeria’s OPEC quota stands at 1.774mn bpd (Photo: BusinessNews.com.ng)
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 41 16•October•2019