Search results

Brazil’s BNDES development bank is financing a project to grow sugar cane in northern Ghana to produce ethanol for export to Sweden. Ghana’s Daily Graphic said planting on 27,000 hectares of land at Makango in the Northern Region would start in September.

Last October’s $750m Eurobond, the first such issue in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa, was heavily oversubscribed; so was a $200m five-year bond for Ghana Telecommunications, raised only three weeks later.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has produced an atlas of ‘before and after’ satellite images documenting environmental change in Africa. Some of the changes, like the shrinking of Lake Chad, now one tenth of its size 40 years ago, and falling water levels in Lake Victoria, are already well recorded, while others, like the disappearance of glaciers in Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains vital to the region’s

Devon Energy’s 3 June announcement confirming the completion of a $2.2bn deal for the sale of its assets in Equatorial Guinea represents a watershed for both parties, allowing the Oklahoma-based vendor to refocus its international E&P operations and the Malabo authorities to consolidate in the development of their domestic energy industry.

As the East African hydrocarbons race heats up, Tanzania has found bidders for four onshore blocks, but in opening up a new oil province they will have to consider the needs of local communities and the country’s vital tourist industry, writes Thalia Griffiths.

African Minerals Ltd, formerly Sierra Leone Diamond Company, has acquired 11.425m shares in Baobab Resources, a mining company listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) with operations in Mozambique.

There is a steady flow of positive news coming from Eskom, as the South African power giant seeks to restore its reputation after several very bad months.

South Africa is keen to promote research into carbon capture and storage, which will help it to exploit its huge CO2 storage capacity.

The government is hoping a compromise proposal can end a dispute over ownership of the Mombasa refinery and allow a badly-needed upgrade to go ahead.

Outside a few pockets of plenty, like the Gulf, bank credit is in short supply across the globe. African Energy’s regular scanning of the markets has suggested some tightening of terms and availability of project finance – and even some trade finance – in H1 2008 (AE 134/24, 132/8).

Cameroonian state company Société Nationale des Hydrocarbures (SNH) has signed a production-sharing contract with Glencore and Afex Global for the gas-prone Matanda block (PH-72). Glencore, who will operate the block adjacent to Bowleven’s Etinde permit area, also has exploration acreage in Equatorial Guinea.

The deals signed during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Libya in April not only shed further light on Russia’s ever more assertive policy towards North Africa – reflected in a growing number of energy sector deals (see Downstream and markets, above) – but may also indicate a potential extension of Libyan policy in the region.

The South African government’s decision to remove its mandate from AES Corporation to develop a long-awaited independent power project (see Power, above), and the rising number of warnings to markets by companies with southern African operations of the potential for losses of earnings due to outages, shows the crisis in the regional electricity supply industry

Every country along the North African littoral from Morocco to Egypt has got at least one refinery project in planning or on the go.

If pessimists are right, it may come to be seen as a balmy period when the strong macroeconomic figures registered by a majority of economies, and the upturn in investor interest from fixed income assets to downstream hydrocarbons mega-projects, suggested that economic positives could now outweigh the perennial political risk factors when assessing African business – the trend recorded by African Energy in 2006-07 (AE 129/22, 120/1).