By Toyin Akinosho
When Duncan Clarke, moderator of the Africa Hydrocarbon Arguments at the Africa Oil Week conference in Cape Town, asked me what I thought would be Africa’s E&P hotspots in the next 10 years, it was the face of Luca Bertelli that flashed in my mind.
Bertelli, Chief Exploration officer for the Italian giant, ENI, has brought a lot of cheer to the conference every year since 2014.
Through his presentations, you get a sense that ENI is getting everything right; with the drill bit, with offtake agreements, with farm downs, with budgets, and with timing around discovery to market, at a time when just about everyone else is complaining.
So my response to Duncan Clarke could have been: “To know where the hotspots would be is to follow where ENI is taking positions”.
