There has been a flood of activities in the last three weeks in Nigeria’s secondary lease sale market.
In the month that Seplat announced the acquisition of AIM listed Eland Oil and Gas, largely for the complementarity of the latter’s Oil Mining Lease (OML) 40 with its base assets, Oslo listed Panoro Energy ASA agreed to sell its entire stake in OML 113 (Aje field) to another Norwegian Junior, PetroNor E&P Limited.
Meanwhile, in what used to be Petrobras’ assets in deepwater Nigeria, the Canadian minnow, Africa Oil Corp., is purchasing the stakes belonging to oil trader Vitol and Warbug Pincus backed Delonex Energy.
Yet it was only two months ago that LEKOIL announced it was acquiring 45% interest in Newcross operated Oil Prospecting Lease (OPL) 276, in the eastern Niger Delta.
ExxonMobil’s divestment of undeveloped discoveries is ongoing and the global news service, Reuters, has broken the news that Chevron would be divesting more than it was previously thought it would be. Chevron has not vigorously denied the report.
But the mother of all of these asset sales will be TOTAL’s divestment of its 12.5% stake in Shell operated OML 118, if yesterday’s Reuters report holds up. OML 118 hosts the Bonga main field, the Bonga North West, the Bonga North and the Bonga South West structures. The Bonga South West is under consideration for a Final Investment Decision (FID) on a project expected to deliver over 175,000BOPD at peak.
