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Nigeria Oil and Gas Opportunity Fair NOGOF 2019

This year’s fair is themed ‘Maximizing Investments in The Oil and Gas Industry for the benefit of the Nigerian People’ as the objective of this Biennial Fair is to bring together major players across the Upstream, Midstream and Downstream sectors as well as the Government Agencies and Industry Regulators, to showcase Opportunities in the Nigerian Oil and Gas industry and present available in-country capacity.

With over 20 Project Opportunity Presentations by Chevron Nigeria Ltd, ExxonMobil Nigeria, Greenville LNG, Nigeria Agip Oil Company, Pinnacle Oil & Gas, Shell Petroleum Development Company, Total E&P Nigeria and many more Upstream, Midstream and Downstream Oil and Gas companies, this event is a must attend for you and your organization.

The fair’s agenda includes technical and opportunity sessions from various stakeholders. All delegates will be given a copy of the Compendium of Nigerian Content Opportunities in the Oil and Gas Industry 2019, it will be provided free of charge by Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) to guide the strategy of investors in the Nigerian oil and gas industry.

Potential benefits of NOGOF 2019 is also aligned to the key thrusts of the NOGICD Act 2010 which  includes Integrating oil producing communities into the oil and gas value chain, fostering institutional collaboration, maximizing participation of Nigerians in oil and gas activities, linking oil and gas sector to other sectors of the economy, maximizing utilization of Nigerian resources i.e. goods, services and assets and attracting investments to the Nigerian oil and gas sector (service providers, equipment suppliers etc).

This year’s fair will be holding in Yenagoa, Bayelsa, on the premises of our new NCDMB headquarters, from the 4th – 5th April

To avoid missing out on one of Nigeria’s most significant, relevant and beneficial Oil and Gas industry events, please visit www.nogofncdmb.com immediately to register.

This event is hosted by NCDMB and organized by Jake Riley Ltd. Please visit our website for more information on the event. www.nogofncdmb.com

 


AOGR Vol 17, No. 9-WHAT’S HAPPENING IN 2017?-Your latest edition of Africa Oil+Gas Report

Dear Subscriber,

The Vol. 17, No 9, the very special, end-year 2016/lookout 2017 edition of Africa Oil+Gas Report, primer on the hydrocarbon industry on the continent, focuses on Who is doing what and where in 2017.

Below is the link to your copy:

https://africaoilgasreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Vol-17-No-9.pdf

Some of the highlights:

• Seplat Takes FID on $1.3Billion ANOS Gas Monetisation Project

• Waltersmith Starts Construction of Refinery

• SacOil Walks out of Moz-S.A Pipeline Deal

MAPS

• Map of the Key Projects of 2017 Around Africa

• Ghana’s Upstream and Midstream Activity Map

• Equatorial Guinea, Latest deals, operations

• Nigeria’s Marginal Fields Activity Update

KICKSTARTER

• Africa’s E&P Hotspots, 2016-2025

IN THE NEWS

• Sasol Will Commence Oil Production in Mozambique

• BP Will Triple Egyptian Production by 2020

FARM IN, FARM OUT

• Is Tullow Selling Out of Ugandan Pipeline?

• NPDC Loosens Grip on Operatorship

BARRELS IN THE TANK

• Angolan Crude Export, with Producing Companies, Jan-September 2016

• Top Nigerian Indigenous Producers, with Production Figures

OIL PATCH SUBSAHARA

· Angola’s Rig Activity October 2016

· Nigeria’s Rig Activity October 2016

Plus the regular features; Company Updates, Concession Status, Petroleum Rights, etc.

Contacts: info@africaoilgasreport.com, ahmed@africaoilgasreport.com, paul@africaoilgasreport.com, +2348028354297, +2348038882629, +2348036525979.


Industry Supports the Continent’s Biggest Literacy Campaign

The oil industry in Nigeria is lining up in support of the Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF), the largest culture picnic in Africa and the continent’s most invigorating feast of the written word.toyin
The Niger Delta Petroleum Resources, Pillar Oil and Platform Petroleum, all Nigerian independents, have supported the 17 year Festival over the past six years.

Lekoil and Neconde weighed in with their backing in 2015 and Lekoil has pledged cash support for 2016.
Midwestern Oil and Gas gave significant financial support in 2013. So did Esso Exploration Nigeria, the deepwater subsidiary of ExxonMobil in the country. Ofserv, an oil service firm, has been a location sponsor since 2015, paying for hotel accommodation for festival participants who fly into Lagos.

Waltersmith Petroman is the latest to commit.
“The LABAF will remain one of the main functions that we support outside of our host communities”, says Layiwola Fatona, Managing Director of Niger Delta Petroleum Resources.“Just be clear on this”, declares Spencer Onosode, Pillar Oil’s Managing Director and a keen lover of books, “We are Partners”.
Hosted at the Freedom Park, site of an old colonial prison renovated into scenic grounds incorporating an art gallery, an auditorium, a museum, food court, amphitheatre and concert space, LABAF runs two parallel programmes; (1) the Adult programme involving discussions around books, book exhibition and fair, visual art display, poetry slam and musical performances, film screenings and art stampede and (2) a workshop-heavy, interactive Youth programme catering to young people between the ages of 9 and 16.

LABAF’s proposition to Nigeria’s leading oil explorers is to use the event to bolster their image as companies keen on the idea of rejuvenating the okotieculture of book reading and engagement with ideas.
Nigeria is home to 170Million people and part of LABAF’s raison d’être is to convert as many as possible of this number into true human capital.
The Festival encourages oil companies to bring young people from the communities where they operate to participate in the Festival’s youth programme, which involves three days of literacy and literary exercises, art and craft workshops, mentorship and book reviews.

Outside these corporate brands, a number of selfless individual oil workers back the Festival in a significant way; by donating the books that are then sent to reviewers and discussants who make up the panels in the several readings and discussion segments which constitute LABAF.

Last year Shell geologist Kehinde Olafiranye shipped in 20 copies of books, including Tom Burgis’ The Looting Machine and Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land for the purpose of two sessions at the 17th LABAF. This year he has ordered three copies of two books; Inside Terrorist Organizations, by David C., 1985. (ed) and 2)Jihad in the West: The Rise of Militant Salafism, by Egerton Frazer.  Bashir Koledoye, a former Chevron geologist who now owns a geoscience consultancy firm named D’Harmattan, bought copies of nine books in 2014, donated money for books in 2015 and in 2016 delivered six copies of three books (two for each) including The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear by David Altheide, and The Spirit of Terrorism, by Jean Baudrillard. Dickson Okotie, a consultant Early Production Facility (EPF) engineer, shipped in 10 books in 2013.ojelabi

In 2014, Dayo Ojo, an ExxonMobil “alumnus” who runs a reputation management company for the industry in Lagos, ordered fifteen copies of both the French scholar Thomas Picketty’s hefty tome: Capital in the 21st Century and Dambisa Moyo’s How The West Was Lost, for the purpose of a session titled Key To The Knowledge Economy. This year, Mr. Ojo has donated copies of Joe Stiglitz’s new book: The Great Divide, Unequal Societies and What To Do With Them, which will be discussed by participants at this year’s session on Key To The Knowledge Economy.

The earliest donors of watersmithbooks to the Festival included Layiwola Adeniji, a Chevron Nigeria communications specialist and Adedoja Ojelabi, former President of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) as well as Femi Aisida, a former Petroleum Engineer with Shell, each donating upwards of 20 books for three consecutive years between 2011 and 2013.

LABAF organisers are encouraged by this show of support for the finer elements of human civilisation by companies and individuals whose jobs involve the old fashioned business of extracting fossil fuels. “This tells us something”, says Jahman Anikulapo, programme chairman of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) and the Festival Director, “The Lagos Book and Art Festival is an important event and we will keep driving it”.
The 2016 edition of LABAF runs from November 10 to November 13 at the Freedom Park in Lagos. The theme is The Tryranny of Knowledge; Literacy is a terrifying weapon against the forces of darkness. Please join us.
Signed

Toyin Akinosho, publisher Africa Oil+Gas Report and Secretary General of CORA, organisers of LABAF.


The current issue of Africa Oil +Gas Report is devoted to the opportunities

The current issue of Africa Oil +Gas Report is devoted to the opportunities and risk taking by home grown African E&P companies. Get access to such business and technical intelligence by subscribing to the journal. Click here


Notes of a Conference Rat

By Toyin Akinosho

Hydrocarbon themed confabs are a growth market in Africa

I was taking the short walk back from the Convention Centre to my Hotel when I ran into Adewale Fayemi, Country Manager of TOTAL E&P in Uganda.

“I saw you grilling the Permanent Secretary a while ago”, he observed, after we exchanged greetings.

“I was curious about the pipeline route from Uganda’s oil fields to the market”, I explained, “but I couldn’t elicit a specific answer”.

I couldn’t help feeling spooked at the chance encounter with Fayemi, at that point. In one breadth I was asking the top bureaucrat at the Ugandan Energy Ministry about the single most important decision in the export of crude oil from his landlocked country. In the next I was talking to the Chief Executive of the local subsidiary of the only oil major operating in Uganda.  And just hours before, I had met briefly with Fayemi’s colleague; Philipe Montagnier, TOTAL’s Vice President Exploration Africa, who told me the company would return to drilling offshore South Africa in 2016, but at a much later date than earlier announced.

These are the sort of interactions that make the Africa Oil Week AOW in Cape Town, South Africa, a must, in my yearly calendar of activities.

I’m an oil and gas journalist for whom access is important. And this particular gabfest facilitates the access, in as informal a way as possible, than many of the talk shops popping up all over the continent.

At the AOW, I have held the gaze of Piero Scaroni, the legendary former CEO of ENI, Italy’s largest company, and asked him pointedly: ‘If you were running Tullow Oil, would you build a small refinery in Uganda?’  I have pushed for answers from Ebie Haan, who was Chief Executive of Sasol Petroleum International, on the likely date of first oil from Mozambique. And with just a handshake with someone I’d rather not name, I knew for certain that the Shell/ENI held deepwater fields Etan-Zaba Zaba, offshore Nigeria, would not get an investment sanction, even in 2016.

People attend conferences for different reasons. Conference organisers offer “networking”, which really translates to “access to decision makers” as a key value proposition. Hydrocarbon themed confabs focused on Africa have grown in leaps and bounds. In the last five years, the growth trajectory has been higher in East Africa, where there have been much more extraordinary exploration successes than in the west and north of the continent.

A significant part of AOW’s drawing power is the series of experiential activities providing intimate encounters evening after exciting evening through the five days. The conference takes full advantage of the extraordinary beauty and scenery of Cape Town, the Tourism capital of the continent. There are fulsome cocktails with splendid views of the Atlantic Ocean. There are after- hour congregations at historic leisure haunts. There are lunches on the beach. I will share an experience shortly. But first, a brief background about me and confabs.

My earliest involvement in conference organization was in 1988, as Publicity Secretary of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE). In 1990, I initiated the process that led to NAPE’s affiliation with the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, (AAPG), the largest association of geoscientists on the planet. Back home, NAPE’s own 37 year old annual meeting constitutes the largest gathering of strictly technical professionals in Nigeria.

In 1995, I was invited to be part of the foundation planning for the birthing of Offshore West Africa OWA, which has moved from Libreville in Gabon, through Accra in Ghana and Abidjan in Cote D’Ivoire to Abuja, in Nigeria and Windhoek in Namibia, perhaps the most mobile feast of its kind. OWA has for 20 years aspired to stamp itself as the sub regional meeting point of oil and gas executives.

The annual African section meeting of the Petroleum Exploration Society of Great Britain (PESGB), which alternates between Houston, the global headquarters of the hydrocarbon industry and London, the UK’s capital city and financial hub, offers some of the most detailed overview on the current thinking on the diverse petroleum systems of the African continent.yes text

The Nigerian Oil and Gas (NOG)conference in Abuja, is the largest in the country, and one of the biggest on the continent, mainly because it guarantees the presence of  the minister and all  his/her men. It also features the entire hydrocarbon chain; from upstream through logistics to refining.

Every May, thousands of petroleum engineers, energy bureaucrats, oil and gas lawyers and businessmen descend on Houston for the Offshore Technical Conference (OTC). It’s a huge meeting ground for oilfield equipment makers and suppliers. The spirited networking opportunity thrown up by the diversity of the congregation has produced a lot of profitable partnerships. The joke often makes the round that you were likelier to extract the consent -of any deal-from the Nigerian Minister of Petroleum during the OTC in Houston, 10,700kilometres and 13hours by flight from the closest Nigerian airport, than you do by visiting the Ministry’s Abuja office.

For all its credentials however, I am far less enthused about attending OTC than I am about Africa Oil Week. I am much more focused on E&P companies, who decide that projects will happen, than contractors, whose jobs depend on those projects. I am keen on getting the various perspectives on the hot button issues around the continent in one shop.

The journalist’s notes are filled with the minutiae of details from the investment banker, the reservoir engineer, the oil and gas lawyer and the operations geologist. Admittedly, a clue about Baker Hughes’ current research on field optimization provides great insight into the future of Shale oil, but it is from the Chief Executives and top officials of independents and majors operating in Africa who commission the seismic operations, pay the drillers, and approve the drainage architecture of the field, as well as from regulators, who sign off on the investment plan, that you get the one liner, or read the body language, that provide the context for the most important story.

The Africa Oil Week provides this specie of exhibition attendee than any other, for my purposes.

I happened on the Africa Oil Week, initially christened Africa Upstream conference, in October 1997, on my first visit to South Africa. I was on vacation to view the Johannesburg Biennale, an international exhibition of edgy, contemporary Visual Art.

Relatively smaller than it is now, the audience and the ambience at the IBM Imax Centre across the road from the V&A Waterfront had confirmed to me that AOW was targeted at the guy in the corner office of the hydrocarbon firm. In its 22nd year, last October, I was certain it had serviced several generations of that corner office occupier and built a community of oil men and women who look forward to the annual feast.

In between trading collegial jokes with an American journalist from Bloomberg and an Indian born reporter working out of London for Platt’s  Oilgram, I’d turned briefly to butt in on a discussion between three African lawyers: the one from Zimbabwe, the second from Namibia  and the third from Uganda. This was all at the beach luncheon to round up the last edition of AOW. Then from the corner of my eye I caught sight of Immanuel Mulunga, former Petroleum Commissioner in the Namibian Ministry of Mines and Energy, who’d just be reassigned to be Chief Executive of the state hydrocarbon company Namcor.  I went up to meet him.

This article was first published in the December 2015 edition of Africa Oil+Gas Report.


Scrambling Out of the Hole

By Toyin Akinosho

Africa is still the sunrise region for most mid-sized, international independents, yet the continent is one of the earliest victims of the low price regime.

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Avuru Donates ~$2MM Hospital to Oil Community

Catholic Diocese of Warri to administer one of the Biggest Health Facilities in Delta State

Austin Avuru, Chief Executive of Seplat Petroleum, has completed a 375Million Naira ($1.9Million), 70 bed health facility in Abbi, in the oil producing ABBI-HOSPITAL-FRONT-ENTRANCEDelta State of Nigeria.

ABBI-HOSPITAL-RECEPTION-(MATERNITY)The hospital comprises eight bungalows, housing an accident emergency bay, a male ward, a female ward, a maternity ward, and a children’s ward. There’s an outpatient clinic, a full digital X ray unit, a laboratory, an ambulance, a kitchen, a canteen and several other services. Each of the wards has two private rooms for people who might choose the privilege to pay a little more.ABBI-HOSPITAL-ENDOSCOPY-ROOM

The facility will be formally opened Sunday, April 26, 2015.“It is my pleasure to personally invite you to the Opening Ceremony of the Catholic Hospital, Abbi, Delta State”, Avuru wrote to friends last week, “a facility that I helped to build and subsequently handed over to the Catholic Diocese of Warri”.

The hospital  has nothing to do with community relations unit of either Platform Petroleum, the marginal field ABBI-HOSPITAL-INSIDE-VIEW-(MALE'S-WARD)operator Avuru founded, or Seplat ABBI-HOSPITAL-CHILDREN'S-WARDPetroleum, of which he is Managing Director.

“I put aside 20% of my income for the past five years to build a church and a hospital for the community in which I was raised”, Avuru told Africa Oil+Gas Report. “It so happened that the church, because it is smaller, was completed earlier” and dedicated in October 2013. “This hospital was completed in December 2014”.ABBI-HOSPITAL-X-RAY-ROOM

ABBI-HOSPITAL-MEDICAL-LAB.-(LEFT-SIDE-VIEW)The decision to hand it to the Catholic Church to run was to be sure it was in the hands of an organization that could be trusted to run it properly. “The biggest cost element in running the facility is the overheads and government should be a natural choice”, Avuru admits. But he wasn’t sure there was a health facility in Delta state which wasn’t run down. “It becomes another outlet of the ministry, trapped in inefficient bureaucracy”. So, does the administration and maintenance by the Catholic Church guarantee adequate financing? The hospital will charge fees normally expected of a non-profit but ABBI-HOSPITAL-FEMALE'S-WARDself-sustaining medical facility.

“My estimation is that in the first three years, they will need help”, Avuru explains in a telephone interview, “I have a budget to support them for those teething three years”.The Catholic Church Hospital in Abbi becomes the foundational project of Austin Avuru’s foundation, whose name he hasn’t publicly come out with. “I have instituted a community health scheme where I pay an annual premium of Three Million Naira ($15,000) from which about 300 registered recipients will receive free medical care (paid for by medical insurance)”, Avuru rounds up. “You know I am not a believer in subsidies”.


African born independents: The Narrative Keeps Evolving

Between December 1 2014 and March 20, 2015, six Nigerian owned independents completed the purchase of equity of four multinational companies in ten acreages in the belly of the country’s prolific Niger Delta Basin.

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Shell’s Huge Cash Haul Out Of Nigeria

By Toyin Akinosho
Shell is minting money in Nigeria, in a manner of speaking. By the time the Anglo Dutch major is done selling its 30% stake in Oil Mining Leases(OML) 18, 24, 25 and 29, in the country’s eastern onshore, it would have, along with its partners, pocketed around eight billion dollars gross.

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Dangote; Larger Refinery Scope, 2017 Delivery

By Toyin Akinosho

Aliko Dangote says the input volume of crude oil for his proposed refinery in Nigeria has been increased to 500,000Barrels of Crude Oil per Day.
It is 25% higher than stated when the project was announced in late 2013. The new input figure is clearly higher than one-fifth of Nigeria’s production.
“We had to expand the size to get more value for the money”, he told a gathering of petroleum geologists in Lagos in early November 2014. Foundation work is going on at the project site in Lekki, in the east of Lagos. Project start-up date was June 2014.

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