Angola, Africa’s second-largest oil producer after Nigeria, will need foreign and government investments to discover up to 57 billion barrels of crude oil by 2025, according to a new energy strategy reported by state news agency ANGOP.
Angola’s plan includes foreign investment of US$679 million as well as US$188 million investment by the Angolan state, the news agency said.
Angola’s new oil and gas strategy to boost production comes a week after the country’s upstream regulator ANPG issued its forecast for oil production from existing fields, which showed that after peaking in 2008 at nearly 2 million bpd, Angola’s oil production would average 1.28 million bpd in 2020, and continuously decline as oilfields mature, to just above 500,000 bpd by 2028, if no new discoveries are made.
OPEC producer Angola has suffered a steady production decline over the past decade, especially after the oil price crash of 2014, because older fields were maturing while prohibitive costs offshore Angola drove upstream investment away.
This year, just after Italy’s Eni started up the Agogo oilfield only nine months after its discovery, the pandemic and the oil price crash deferred exploration drilling everywhere, including in Angola.
Apart from Eni, France’s Total has also been active offshore Angola in recent years, planning to drill an ultra-deepwater well off the coast of Angola that will be the deepest in the world. The campaign, which began in January 2020, was estimated to last 240 days, said Maersk Drilling, whose drillship Maersk Voyager was set to drill the deepest well ever drilled offshore.
However, the pandemic halted drilling activities for several months.
Olivier Jouny, Managing Director of Total Exploration & Production Angola, told Africa Oil & Power last week that Maersk Voyager was due to restart drilling at the end of August.
“We are now ramping-up our activities offshore and will restart drilling wells, perform seismic acquisitions and non-routine production and maintenance operations on both Block 17 and 32,” Jouny said.
