Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company, EGAS, the Egyptian state hydrocarbon company in charge of gas assets, has concluded its 10 month long 2012 International bid round, with the award of acreages to Italian giant ENI, Canada listed Sea Dragon Energy, and UAE based Dana Gas.
ENI won the 3,765km² deepwater Shorouk Offshore exploration Block (Block 9) in the Eastern Mediterranean, through its wholly-owned subsidiary IEOC.
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TOTAL has encountered 28 metres of net oil pay in its Ivoire 1X deep-water exploration well off Cote d’Ivoire.
The well is not tested yet, but the result is a boon for the current geologic thinking focused on the West African Transform Margin(WATM), in which the well is located.
WATM refers to the Cretaceous sequence in the south Atlantic that extends from Nigeria in the east to Sierra Leone in the west. Countries in between include Cote D’Ivoire, Liberia, Benin and Ghana.
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The recent agreement between the Ugandan Government and three International Oil Companies, calling for a 30,000Barrels Per Day refinery in Uganda, as well as export pipeline, is the deal that Tullow Oil has sought for the past five years. In the war of rhetoric with the Ugandan government, Tullow Oil had always insisted it could do a small scale refinery in Uganda but must build an export pipeline to export most of the crude.
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Four hundred student delegates from twenty five universities from all over Africa descended on the University of Nigeria, Nsukka to participate in the 11th Students’ Technical Conference and Exhibition.
The event, organized by the Society of Petroleum Engineers Nigeria Council (SPENC) witnessed the presentation of twenty seven undergraduate technical papers, four graduate (PHD) technical papers, the exciting Petroquiz competition and a first of its kind Career Fair organized by Shell Petroleum Development Company.
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London listed Afren is on course to spud Ogo-1 in Oil Prospective Lease(OPL) 310 in the Benin Basin, offshore Lagos. OPL 310 is held by Optimum Petroleum, a Nigerian E&P company. Afren is the technical and financing partner. The well is to be drilled by GSF Monitor, a jack up rig owned by Transocean, to a planned depth of 3,536 metres (or 11,600feet). The site is 24km from the Lagos coastline. Logistics will be provided by Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics, LADOL.
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With 4,000BOPD flowed in two zones in discovery well, operator wants to find out what lies deeper
By Fred Akanni
Conoil, the Nigerian independent, has moved the HTHP swamp barge Majestic to Ango-2, to appraise the deep oil zones it tested in Ango-1 Sidetrack 3 and even probe deeper.
Ango-2 is prognosed to drill to a total depth(TD) of 18,500ft (or 5639metres) True Vertical Depth (TVD), meaning that it still wants to probe the reservoirs it could not reach, due to tough drilling conditions, in the discovery well.
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American independent Anadarko has completed drilling its Kubwa well in the L-07 Block offshore Kenya, which encountered non-commercial oil shows in reservoir-quality sands.
It’s the company’s first probe of Kenya’s deepwater, and the second well in the terrain in eight months. The Mbawa South well in Block 8, drilled in third quarter 2012 by Apache Corp., another American independent, encountered 53metre net gas pay, making it the first hydrocarbon discovery offshore Kenya,
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Lukoil, the Russian company, nearly doubled its net profit, year on year to $1.4Billion in 2012, compared with 2011.
But Africa is absent from the company’s profit centres. There have been exploration successes in Egypt and Cote d’Ivoire in the past two years. The Egyptian discovery is likely to come on stream earlier, but the company is not telling.
“Production of marketable hydrocarbons (from all international upstream projects of LUKOIL except for the Tengiz) totaled 68.4 million BOE (13% increase compared to 2011, which was mainly reached due to the progress of gas production in Uzbekistan)”, the company said in a release.
“Revenues were $3.2 billion (9% increase), EBITDA amounted to $2.3 billion (45% increase), net profit was $1.4 billion (almost twofold increase)”, Lukoil said in a widely circulated statement.
The company’s cash cows are mainly in Uzbekistan and Venezuela. Lukoil is looking to profitability in Iraq in the short term. There’s considerable pay from Kazakhstan, but Lukoil did not factor this into the report it released about its international operations.
“Within the development project for the giant West Qurna-2 field in Iraq, the first phase of field infrastructure development was started in April 2012 (Mishrif Early Oil Phase): development drilling and construction of the key production facilities including the central processing facility, the gas turbine power plant, the export pipeline and the Tuba tank farm. This phase covers achieving the production rate of 400 Kbbl of oil per day by the end of 2014, with a full pay-off period of 2-3 years. Production of the first oil from the project is expected in late 2013 – early 2014.
“In Uzbekistan, the largest field of the Southwest Gissar Project, Dzharkuduk-Yangi Kyzylcha reached its target production rate (1 bcm of natural gas per year). The gas production target at the Khauzak-Shady field was substantially exceeded due to application of production stimulation techniques. Drilling operations and facility construction in the Kandym block of fields are in progress.
“In the Junin-6 project in Venezuela (LUKOIL takes part in the project as a member of the Russian National Petroleum Consortium), production of early oil in the volume of 50 Kboe per day started in September 2012.
Exploration success was mainly achieved through follow-up exploration of the production acreages. Particularly the Company discovered two fields: Emry Deep in the Meleiha block (Egypt) and Shurdarye in the Southwest Gissar block (Uzbekistan)”.
The Nigerian Association Of Petroleum Explorationists(NAPE) has decided, for its 2013, annual industry workshop, to tackle the subject of operational and business environment in which Nigerian marginal field operators and the country’s emerging indigenous independents are working.
“We want to examine the experiences, the challenges and the successes of the Marginal Field Operators, 10 years after the licences were awarded to them”, says Adedoja Ojelabi, President Elect of NAPE and Chairman of The Conference Planning Committee, of which the workshop is a part.
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While other miners and hopefuls find themselves forced into delays and cutbacks because of funding woes and low commodity prices, Toronto-based CIC Energy is pressing ahead with plans to build a coal mine and power station at its Mmamabula project, in Botswana. The firm has now completed a mine plan for the 4.5Million tons a year coal mine and announced the selection of Chinese mechanical and electrical equipment manufacturer Shanghai Electric as the preferred engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for the initial power plant.
The company aimed to have submitted a mining licence application to the government of Botswana by end of 2008, and should begin the procurement process for the development of the mine and the associated infrastructure in 2009.
A turnkey EPC contract will be awarded for the manufacturing and erection of the wash plant and discussions are “well advanced” with the preferred contractor, the company reported. The coal crushing system and associated coal conveyor system will also be tendered for a turnkey EPC contract, and the procurement process for the equipment required for steady state mining will get under way in early 2009.
T h e M m a m a b u I a coalfield contains an estimated 2.93billion tons of coal in the measured and indicated categories, plus 34-million tons of inferred resources.
Despite a debilitating shortage of electricity supply in the Southern African region, the company had to abandon plans earlier in 2008 to award contracts for a 2,400-MW project, after its off takers, South Africa’s Eskom and the Botswana Power Corporation, were unable to agree on assuming risk for the project in order to meet lender requirements.
However, the firm now expects to sign 30-year off take agreements with both utilities by mid-2009, by which time it should also have a funding agreement in place.
The capital cost to build the mine and power station has been estimated at $3billion, and the company is in talks with development finance institutions, South African commercial banks and a Chinese export credit agency, which is being targeted for a “large segment” of the project funding.
CIC is not concerned by the impact of the financial crisis on the company’s ability to raise funds, because the lenders that it was targeting had not been affected as much as commercial banks.
In the meantime, the firm will fund early infrastructure work on the project from its $89-million treasury.
It has already begun a formal tender process for early work like site clearing, earthworks, roads, water-supply and waste water treatment facilities, and plans td use local contractors in Botswana as much as possible.
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