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Canadian Overseas Petroleum has listed its shares on London’s main market ahead of drilling planned on LB-13 this year. The Calgary-based company, whose shares are also listed on the Toronto Venture Exchange, said drilling would start “this year, as a drilling rig and support services become available”. The company is carried by ExxonMobil for the first $120m of costs of a two-well exploration programme planned for 2014 as part of a farm-in completed in April 2013. Chevron is bringing in the newbuild West Tellus ultra-deepwater drillship to drill on its three blocks adjacent to LB-13.

Liberian farmers, charcoal producers and workers have filed a complaint with the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (Opic), accusing it of failing to monitor investments made to a failed biomass project. Between 2009 and 2011, Buchanan Renewables (BR) received $216.7m from Opic for a project to harvest rubber trees for biomass, rejuvenate family farms and generate sustainable energy for Liberia. Opic’s investment covered 70% of the costs of the project, which aimed to convert old rubber trees from the former Firestone plantation to woodchip. The woodchips were intended to fuel a 36MW biomass power plant in Monrovia and be sold for export.

The Liberia Electricity Corporation has signed an agreement with the UK’s Dawnus International to carry out enabling works for the Mount Coffee hydropower rehabilitation project. Work will include building two cofferdams and the advance camp, as well as removal of vegetation and cleaning the powerhouse, and will be carried out by April 2014. The 64MW facility on the St Paul River was built in 1966 and extensively damaged during Liberia’s civil war. The government signed a €50m agreement with the European Investment Bank early last year to finance the rehabilitation work.

A rig is due into Liberia next year for a multi-company drilling programme in Q2 2014. Chevron, ExxonMobil, ‘super-indie’ Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and potentially African Petroleum Corporation could all drill next year, although the latter is hoping for a farm-out first. Chevron has already drilled two wells on its acreage without releasing results. “We’re staying quiet on the results but we’re coming back to drill some more,” Chevron Africa & Latin America Exploration & Production Company vice president frontier exploration and appraisal Ken Sample told African Energy.

Liberia has won $50m of funding from the Climate Investment Funds for its Scaling-up Renewable Energy Programme (SREP) investment plan. The programme aims to improve access to power in rural areas through off-grid electricity schemes based on small hydro, solar, biomass, and hybrid systems. The investment plan has been organised into a single programme in order to lower costs and address capacity constraints.

The African Development Bank board approved a financing package on 6 November for the Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea (CLSG) electricity networks interconnection project. The total financing by the African Development Fund, Fragile States Facility and Nigeria Trust Fund amounts to €145m, representing roughly 40% of the total project cost. The project will secure power supply for the four Mano River Union member countries, and will be implemented between 2014 and 2017. The CLSG project involves the construction of about 1,400km of high voltage (225 kV) line to connect the national networks of the four countries.

GABON: Grand Poubara dam start-up. China’s Sinohydro has brought on stream the Grand Poubara hydro plant on the Ogooué River. The dam has an installed capacity of 160MW, from four 40MW turbines. The project also includes two transmission lines, one to Franceville, Gabon’s third largest city, 15km from the project site, the other to the manganese mining region of Moanda. A second phase is planned to increase capacity to 280MW. Two other hydro projects are under construction, Chutes de l’Impératrice on the Ogooué River, and Fe2 on the Okano River (AE 245/1). 
 


Following a farm-in from ExxonMobil on its Block LB-13, Canadian Overseas Petroleum Limited (COPL) plans to list its shares on London’s Alternative Investment Market in 2014. Chief executive Andrew Milholland told an investor forum in London organised by Proactive Investors that the company had seen its shares triple in value on the Toronto Venture Exchange in the last 12 months. Parliament ratified an amended production-sharing contract for the block in April 2013, giving ExxonMobil an 80% operating stake and COPL the remaining 20%. A well is planned for Q1 2014.

The Export-Import Bank of India signed a line of credit agreement worth up to $144m with the government of Liberia on 11 September for a power transmission and distribution project. The line of credit is the first that the bank has provided to Liberia and will reimburse the entire value of contracts awarded to Indian exporters.

Robert Sirleaf, son of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has resigned as president of National Oil Company of Liberia (Nocal) and as a presidential adviser, saying that the passing of new oil laws means his job is done. “With the submission to our national legislature of a comprehensive modernisation of the laws governing Liberia’s petroleum sector and Nocal… my job is complete,” Sirleaf said in a 17 September resignation letter addressed to his mother. Nocal vice-president for public affairs Israel Akinsaya resigned the same day “due to pressing family matters”.

Tullow Oil has announced plans to farm down its equity in the Tweneboa-Enyenra-Ntomme (Ten) development and production area in return for a carry on development costs. “This will enable Tullow to manage its exposure to development spend over the coming years whilst retaining a material interest and operatorship of the high-value oil production expected to commence in mid-2016,” the company said. The importance of Tullow’s West African oil production portfolio can be seen in the company’s H1 results, in which the region represented 77% of the company’s 88,600 boe/d working interest production. Production from Ghana’s Jubilee field is 110,000 b/d, with a target of 120,000 b/d by year-end, while the company is working to maintain stable production from established fields in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has renewed calls for a fast-track court on corruption. Speaking during the dedication of projects undertaken for independence celebrations on 26 July, she said that the three branches of government – executive, legislative (consisting of the Senate and House of Representatives) and judiciary – would work together for the country’s prosperity. “We have been calling for a fast-track court on corruption; so we are emphasising that call on the legislature because the executive cannot do it alone. We need to address some problems,” she said.

Speaking in Cape Town at the end of June, Barack Obama unveiled a new multi-billion dollar power initiative, Power Africa, aimed at doubling sub-Saharan access rates, boosting generation capacity by 10,000MW and connecting more than 20m households and businesses to the grid over the next five years. Under the scheme, the US government will provide $7bn of financial support, while a major private sector investment drive will pump an additional $9bn-worth of investment into African power projects. Power Africa has identified six initial partner countries – Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania – all of which “have set ambitious goals in electric power generation and are making the utility and energy sector reforms to pave the way for investment and growth”, according to the White House. 


Engineering contractor Motherwell Bridge has completed construction of the first tank of a $22m project to renovate and build 22 oil storage tanks at the state-owned Liberia Petroleum Refining Company (LPRC) terminal on Bushrod Island.

Work is getting under way on the $35m World Bank-financed Accelerated Electricity Expansion Project (AEEP). Due for completion by 30 June 2018, the project will help the government reach its target of connecting 70% of the population of the capital, Monrovia, and 35% of the national population to the grid by 2030. The Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC) had only 14,000 customers registered in December 2012, up from 2,469 in July 2010, and equivalent to 6.7% of the population of Monrovia and 1.6% of the population as a whole. Expanding access has been hampered by the high cost of electricity, which at $0.50/kWh is among the costliest in the world and compares poorly with the sub-Saharan average of $0.15/kWh.