Page 12 - AfrOil Week 36

AfrOil INVESTMENT AfrOil

Woodside did not reveal the financial terms of oil and 160mn boe of natural gas.
its deal with Cairn. It did state, though, that it The joint venture has said it hopes to begin
hoped to complete the transaction in the fourth extracting oil from Sangomar in early 2023.
quarter of 2020, provided that both the Sen- Woodside stated in June that it still expected to
egalese government and its own shareholder meet this deadline, and it reiterated that point in
approved the SPA. its statement of September 6. ™
As a result of its acquisition of Cairn’s stake in
RSSD, Woodside’s holdings in two of the block’s
three fields, Rufisque and Sangomar Deep Off-
shore, will climb from 35% to 75%. Meanwhile,
its holdings in the third field, Sangomar Off-
shore, will rise from 35% to 68.33%.
The Australian company is taking a smaller
stake in Sangomar Offshore in order to accom-
modate the national oil company (NOC) Pet-
rosen, which has announced plans to boost its
stake in that field from 10% to 18%. Petrosen is
on track to acquire 6.33% of equity in Sangomar
Offshore from Woodside and another 1.67%
from Australia’s FAR, another shareholder in
RSSD.
The Sangomar block, formerly known as
SNE, lies offshore and is about 100 km from
Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Woodside, the
operator, discovered oil there in 2014. RSSD has
determined that the block holds an estimated
645mn barrels of oil equivalent (boe) in recover-
able reserves, including 485mn barrels of crude The Sangomar block includes four fields (Image: Woodside Energy)

Total Tanzania says it has

no plans to exit the country

TANZANIA THE Tanzanian division of France’s Total has “We reached a point whereby in some loca-
denied reports that it is preparing to exit the East tions, our service stations were competing with
African country, where it has a chain of around each other. The best business decision to make
100 retail filling stations. at that point was to sell some of the property but
Marsha Msuya-Kilewo, the corporate affairs in short, Total is here in Tanzania to stay,” she
director of Total Tanzania, told The Citizen last told The Citizen.
week that rumours of the company’s possible
retreat from Tanzania were baseless. The specu-
lation appears to have arisen in the wake of Total
Tanzania’s recent announcement of plans to sell
some of its retail assets, she said. She stressed,
though, that the company was taking this step
not as a prelude to leaving Tanzania but rather
within the framework of its asset management
strategy.
Msuya-Kilewo explained that Total Tan-
zania’s decision stemmed from its acquisition
of Gulf Africa Petroleum Corp (Gapco) from
India’s Reliance Industries in 2017. That trans-
action gave the former company control of Gap-
co’s retail filling stations in Tanzania, Kenya and
Uganda, she said, but it also created a situation
in which Total Tanzania’s stations actually found
themselves in competition with Gapco facilities.
As a result, the Total subsidiary is trying to opti-
mise its asset portfolio. Tanzania is home to about 100 Total filling stations (Image: Total.co.tz)

P12 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 36 09•September•2020