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Operator BG has made another new gas discovery with the Mkizi-1 well, drilled by the Deepsea Metro I drillship in 1,301 metres of water between the Mzia and Jodari discoveries in Block 1. The well encountered 33 metres of gas pay in three reservoir intervals within a Tertiary-aged stacked channel complex.

Growing power demand and a steady pace of gas discoveries offshore Tanzania and northern Mozambique have encouraged planners to consider an LNG plant for Mombasa. The Indian Ocean port is set to become a major energy hub, writes Kimemia Mugo in Nairobi. Consultants Mott MacDonald are carrying out a second phase of studies for a potential liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasification plant and import facility at Mombasa. The project, funded by the World Bank and other international lenders, is set to be the first of its kind in East Africa

A review of oil and gas contracts and legislation planned by the African Petroleum Producers Association (APPA) aims to simplify the negotiating process by drawing up a model contract based on international standards and best practice in Africa and worldwide.

Nearly a year after the unity government came to power, Zimbabwe’s economic fundamentals are little improved and financiers are holding back from supporting essential projects, writes Kevin Godier

Officials at this month’s gas master plan roadshows emphasised how well positioned Nigeria was in terms of gas export potential. “Regionally, we are positioning ourselves very strongly and recently started

President George Weah on 16 October signed into law the amended Petroleum Act of 2019, which aims to update the 2014 law as part of efforts to revive offshore oil and gas exploration. The law increases block sizes to a maximum of 3,500km2, from 2,000km2 previously. National Oil Company of Liberia (Nocal) is working with TGS-Nopec to re-draw the blocks. The re-sized blocks will align with the Global Grid System as mandated by the Economic Community of West African States for its members, Nocal said.

The second quarter of 2019 saw 1.8GW of generation capacity added to the grid in Africa. This was a notable increase on Q1, which saw the slowest growth this decade when compared with quarterly averages from previous years. However, 794MW resulted from a unit coming online at the long-delayed Medupi coal power plant in South Africa, which has been bringing online new units periodically since 2015 and has been under construction since 2007.

Total and Repsol have become the latest international companies to renegotiate an Algerian production concession. On 11 June, they and their partner the national oil and gas company Sonatrach signed new 25-year contract with industry regulator Agence Nationale pour la Valorisation des Ressources en Hydrocarbures (Alnaft) under terms set out in the current version of the hydrocarbons law. Better terms and conditions will not become available until 2019 at the earliest, when amendments to the law are expected to be formally introduced.

Denmark’s Vestas announced on 1 November that it has been awarded a contract to supply, install and commission 41 V117-3.45MW turbines at Enel Green Power’s 148MW Oyster Bay wind project in the Eastern Cape. The turbines will operate in an optimised 3.6MW mode. Vestas’ subsidiary Vestas Southern Africa intends to procure locally produced towers, which will stand at a hub height of 91.5 metres.

After winning a tender in 2017 to provide electricity to 300,000 households in Togo over five years, off-grid solar company BBOXX has launched a new distributed energy service company (desco) to handle in-country operations. BBOXX Togo is owned by BBOXX alongside EDF and BBOXX equity partner Beam. BBOXX is already supplying electricity to 26,000 households, having opened around 20 shops employing 100 people.

Federalists in Cyrenaica are publicly maintaining a hard line in their seven-month stand-off with the central government. Negotiations have stalled, and a sense of crisis pervades every part of Libya’s transitional institutions, but military options to retake the terminals – although discussed – seem remote. The high-risk strategy being promoted by the main federalist grouping behind the blockades, the Political Bureau of Cyrenaica (PBC), is to push for the failure of the current transitional institutions in the hope of claiming the right to self-determination and to sell oil independently in the ensuing vacuum.

Savannah Petroleum has kicked off its exploration drilling programme with an oil discovery on the Bushiya prospect. Savannah’s acreage consists of areas relinquished by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in the Agadem Rift Basin, offering low-risk exploration on existing plays. The Bushiya-1 well on the R3 portion of the R3/R4 contract area was drilled by the GW 215 rig to a total measured depth of 2,200 metres and encountered an estimated ten metres of net oil-bearing reservoir sandstones across two intervals (three metres and seven metres) in the primary Eocene Sokor Alternances objective.

The suspension of Madagascar Oil's shares two weeks after listing highlights the problems facing the transitional government, writes Paul Melly. Under the guise of a New Year courtesy call on mining and hydrocarbons minister Mamy Ratovomalala, a delegation of senior managers from oil companies active in Madagascar began to lay the ground for new development talks with the government. In mid-December 2010, Ratovomalala made operators and ..

Actis has made its final exit from Ugandan electricity distribution company Umeme, ending a ground-breaking investment that began a decade ago. Following a privatisation process in 2005, Actis held 100% of the former state company’s equity; since 2012, it has built up an institutional and retail investor base by selling down equity on the Uganda and Nairobi exchanges. A significant tranche of shares was sold by Actis’s Umeme Holdings Ltd (UHL) subsidiary to institutional and retail investors in June 2014, when Actis made a commitment to the Kampala government to retain a minimum stake of 14% for at least 24 months.

Groupement Berkine, the Sonatrach-Anadarko joint venture which produces just under 150,000 b/d from the El Merk oil field, has come under scrutiny for the large number of gré-à-gré (single source) tenders it has issued over the past five years. An Algiers-based unofficial and unregistered NGO, the Association Nationale de Lutte contre la Corruption (ANLC), and the web-based news service Algérie-Focus claimed at the end of June that they had been anonymously emailed details of 1,150 gré-à-gré contracts issued by the joint venture between 2011 and 2015. ANLC secretary general Halim Feddal described the quantity of this type of contract as “a terrible situation”, as uncompetitive tendering is supposed to be the exception rather than the rule.