Nigeria is back in a big asset sale season.
This is like mid- 2013 all over again, a half-year after RoyalDutch Shell completed a significant asset sale and was about to conduct another. But this time, the scale is humongous, and the above headline is closer to the narrative than it was when we ran it in 2013.
Our latest edition, just released to our global pool of paying subscribers, covers the asset sale with full disclosure.
Shell is about to sell acreages. ExxonMobil is in the midst of selling and Chevron has almost concluded a sale.
But again, the really big disposer is RoyalDutch Shell.
When the European major concludes the imminent sale of its equity in 18 joint venture assets in Nigeria, it will be left with just one operated acreage and two non-operated assets, all of them in deepwater. Midstream, it will still hold the largest non-state share in the NLNG plant, but it will no longer be in direct control of the feedstock. The company whose name was, for most of the last 65 years, synonymous with the phrase ‘Nigerian Oil industry’, will have retreated into the background.
In our last monthly edition, released in mid-July, 2021, we explored the likely beneficiaries of these sales. We have updated the analysis in this edition. In that issue, we worried about the impairment to the state coffers and debated whether the overall divestment picture was a good or bad sign, on balance to the fiscus. In this edition, we ask, why is the state company deeply concerned about this sale?
Elsewhere in the magazine, our regulars are of course included: who is getting to first oil; who is drilling what and where? Where in Africa is gas being commercialized and how can our subscribers benefit from such opportunity? Where else is opening up and what are the new technologies?
The Africa Oil+Gas Report is the primer of the hydrocarbon and the growing new energy industry on the continent. It is the market leader in local contextualizing of global developments and policy issues and is the go-to medium for decision makers, whether they be international corporations or local entrepreneurs, technical enterprises or financing institutions, for useful analyses of Africa’s oil and gas industry. Published by the Festac News Press Limited since November 2001, AOGR is a monthly, publication delivered to subscribers around the world. Its website remains www.africaoilgasreport.com and the contact email address is info@africaoilgasreport.com. Contact telephone numbers in our West African regional headquarters in Lagos are +2348038882629, +2348036525979, +2347062420127, +2348023902519.
