Page 15 - AfrOil Week 18 2022

AfrOil PROJECTS & COMPANIES AfrOil

However, it said that the amendments would brings more visibility to operators, including
authorise TotalEnergies to carry out explora- TotalEnergies. The idea is to relaunch the drill-
tion and production operations in the Republic ing in order to be able to combat the decline,” he
of Congo’s offshore zone. said, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
Meanwhile, Dow Jones Newswires quoted For his part, the Republic of Congo’s Minis-
Nicolas Wawresky, the managing director of ter of Hydrocarbons, Bruno Jean-Richard Itoua,
TotalEnergies EP Congo, as saying that the revi- also expressed the desire to boost the country’s
sions concerned the PSCs covering Moho Nord, crude yields. He pointed out that production
N’kossa and Yanga-Sendji, as well as unnamed levels had sunk notably over the last three years
exploration blocks. The first three are all estab- since the advent of the coronavirus (COVID-19)
lished sites; indeed, the French major notes on pandemic.
its website that Moho Nord accounts for 60% of The Republic of Congo extracted some
the Republic of Congo’s total oil production. 339,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude in 2019,
Wawresky indicated that the amendments according to official government data. This
were designed to help reverse the trend toward made it the third-largest oil producer in sub-Sa-
sinking output at the sites in question. “The sign- haran Africa, trailing behind only Nigeria and
ing of these seven amendments to the produc- Angola. Crude accounts for around 90% of the
tion-sharing contracts is an important step in country’s exports and slightly more than 50% of
being able to have a regulatory framework that the government’s budget revenues.. ™

Tanzania hopes to sign initial

deals on LNG project by May 31

TANZANIA TANZANIA’S government expects to sign ini- production trains with a capacity of 5mn tonnes
tial agreements with five international oil com- per year (tpy) each.
panies (IOCs) on a TZS70 trillion ($30bn) LNG The Tanzania LNG plant will secure its feed-
project by the end of May, local daily The Citizen stock from Block 1 and Block 4, two offshore
reports. fields operated by Shell, and Block 2, operated
Charles Sangweni, acting director-general by Equinor. (ExxonMobil also holds a stake in
of the Petroleum Upstream Regulatory Author- the latter site.) These three deepwater offshore
ity (PURA), said during a visit to the Mnazi sites hold more than 35 trillion cubic feet (991bn
gas-processing plant that the parties were com- cubic metres) of gas.
mitted to the project and that negotiations were Tanzania, East Africa’s second-biggest econ-
on track. omy, is estimated to have gas reserves of 57
“It is a process, and we believe we will attain trillion cubic feet (1.614 trillion cubic metres).
our goals. We expect that by May 31 [of] this It is currently producing around 110bn cubic
year, we will have entered into the initial Host feet (3.12 bcm) per year of gas from the Songo
Government Agreements (HGAs), which will Songo, Mnazi Bay and Kiliwani North fields. ™
pave the way for more comprehensive negoti-
ations,” he was quoted by The Citizen as saying.
The negotiations are expected to take two
to three years to complete before a final invest-
ment decision (FID) is made, after which project
fundraising will commence, Sangweni contin-
ued. He also said that the actual construction of
the plant was likely to take four to five years.
Negotiations on the project resumed late
last year, following their suspension in August
2019 by the government, which cited the need to
review the country’s production-sharing agree-
ment (PSA) framework.
The Tanzania LNG scheme is a partner-
ship between the Tanzanian government and
five companies, including Shell (UK), Equinor
(Norway) and ExxonMobil (US). It envisions
the construction of an onshore gas liquefac-
tion plant in Lindi, a port in the southern part
of the country. The plant will have two or three The proposed LNG plant would be built in the southern city of Lindi (Image: Equinor)

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