Africa: In Niger's Oil Industry, Fortune Favours the Bold

5 November 2018
opinion

The story of oil exploration in Africa is one of many failures and victories, of bold bets in unexplored areas that have brought great returns, of forgotten lands that only some bold few decided to venture in, in the search for riches. This has been the story for many of Africa's current oil and gas hot spots. It's hard to imagine that at one point in time, no one believed that Equatorial Guinea had oil or was even willing to try it out. Sudan, Chad, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, Liberia... they are all in one way or another, nations whose potential was for long snubbed by international oil and gas companies, until one bold player took the chance and found these so desired resources.

The Republic of Niger is the newest one in the list, and one that is attracting more and more attention. Just since April 2018, junior British independent exploration and production company Savannah Petroleum has recorded five consecutive commercially viable oil discoveries in its R3 and R4 Production Sharing Contract areas in the Agadem Rift basin (ARB), in the Southeast of Niger. While the company has relayed the report of the estimated reserves in place for the end of its exploratory program, the results are extremely promising. So much so that even before its latest discovery in October, the company had already signed a legally binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the government of the Republic of Niger outlining the steps of cooperation necessary on both parties for the adequate implementation of an early production scheme for the R3 block. These include the support in negotiations of oil sales agreements with the country's only refinery, the Société de Raffinage de Zinder (SORAZ), as well as facilitating access to the third party-owned pipeline connection from ARB to the refinery.

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