Page 7 - AfrOil Week 39 2019

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In 2017, Maputo instructed Italy’s Eni to pay $350mn in capital gains tax after it sold a stake in Coral South, a natural gas field, to the US super-major ExxonMobil.
Anadarko was acquired by Occidental shortly after it made a final investment decision (FID) in favour of proceeding with an inte- grated gas project known as Mozambique LNG. In the FID, it pledged to spend some $20bn on the development of onshore and offshore gas fields in Mozambique’s Rovuma Basin, along with the construction of a gas liquefaction plant and LNG export terminal.
Some of the funding for Mozambique will come from the US Export-Import Bank, whose board members voted unanimously last week to approve a direct loan of up to $5bn for the ini- tiative.The decision may have been prompted by political considerations, as Chinese and Russian lenders had also expressed interest in providing financial support for the scheme.
Meanwhile, Mozambique’s government hopes Eni and ExxonMobil will commit to another large-scale gas project in December of this year. The companies have said they are aiming to invest $30bn in an integrated gas development, liquefaction and export project that will be known as Rovuma LNG.
Eni was the first international oil company (IOC) to sign on to a major LNG scheme in
Mozambique. In 2017, it made an FID in favour of going forward with Coral South LNG, a $10bn project that will bring gas from the Coral South offshore block to the world’s first ultra-deepwater LNG plant for processing. ™
Ugandan official says collapse of Tullow’s farm-out deal does not derail oil industry
UGANDA
A Ugandan official said last week that the country’s nascent oil industry was not doomed because of the collapse of Tullow Oil’s $900mn farm-out deal with France’s Total and China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) for the Lake Albert project.
According to Robert Kasande, the perma- nent secretary of Uganda’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, recent events are a setback but they will not derail oil development completely. For one thing, he said, the French company has not withdrawn from Uganda.
“Total has a sizeable share of the oil, so they just can’t walk away,” Kasande was quoted as saying by The Observer. “They have scaled down on the deployment in the field because of the collapse of the [deal with Tullow], but other activities like the environmental and social impact assessment are continuing.”
For another, he said, Tullow is still looking for a way to accomplish the goal that it set for itself when arranging the sale of stakes to Total and CNOOC – namely, to raise additional funds. “What happened is that Tullow Oil was looking for resources to invest,” he said. “What they have done now is to go back to the market to look for these resources.”
In the meantime, he commented, Uganda’s government is looking for a way to work with the parties in the hope of ensuring that Tullow Oil makes a final investment decision (FID) by the end of 2019, as previously agreed. “As this is happening, we are continuing to engage. We are going to have a meeting to see that we stay on course so that the FID is reached at the end of this year,” he said.
Kasande is not the first Ugandan official to
voice Kampala’s hope that the FID would not
be delayed. 
Perm. Sec. Robert Kasande (Photo: The Independent)
Image: Total
Week 39 02•October•2019 w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Impact Oil & Gas P7