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Cairn Energy has announced that the SNE North-1 exploration well encountered oil and gas in the primary objective and oil in the deeper secondary objective in a separate accumulation to the SNE field.The well was drilled to test the Sirius prospect, to the north of the SNE field. Cairn said further work was being undertaken to establish the potential commerciality of the discovery and to integrate the results with existing data.

Ophir Energy has announced a gas discovery with the Tonel-1 well on Block R, bringing total resources in the block close to the threshold for a second liquefied natural gas (LNG) train on Bioko Island.

AIM-listed Sound Energy said on 18 April that a drilling rig was on the way to the Sidi Moktar licence, where it plans to re-enter two wells drilled by the previous licenceholder, Longreach Oil & Gas. Longreach discovered gas on the licence in 2014 but ran out of money before it could test the wells.The Sidi Moktar licences cover 2,700km2 in the Essaouira Basin of central Morocco close to existing infrastructure, including the state-owned Office Cherifien des Phosphates plant.

Victoria Oil & Gas subsidiary Gaz du Cameroun (GDC) is preparing to drill two additional wells into the onshore Logbaba field and has signed a rig contract with Savannah Oil Services Cameroon. Drilling is planned to start in late Q2 and complete by year-end. VOG described the budget for the two-well drilling programme as “less than $40m, significantly lower than initial estimates made in 2015”.

Ophir Energy has contracted Ocean Rig’s dynamically positioned semi-submersible rig Eirik Raude for three firm wells plus one contingent well on Block R

Cameroon’s second floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) project has taken a step forward with the signing of a gas convention agreement between New Age LNG and the government establishing the fiscal terms for its project to produce gas from the Etinde permit. Project company CMLNG, a subsidiary of New Age LNG, will use a newbuild FLNG production vessel to process gas from Etinde. The FLNG project will be developed in conjunction with the upstream Etinde development, operated by parent company New Age (African Global Energy).

While Algiers tries to gain better control over Sonatrach's operations, IOCs remain concerned that the authorities are prone to inflexibility and obsessed with outmoded concepts of national interest

Equatorial Guinea’s application to join the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has been successful and the country will become the fourth sub-Saharan African member. An Opec statement said a meeting in Vienna on 25 May considered Equatorial Guinea’s request to join the organisation and decided to approve its admission with immediate effect.Equatorial Guinea was among 11 non-Opec members that agreed to production cuts in December to stabilise the oil price.

Tullow Oil’s reported $300m bid to buy the West Cape Three Points Block stake held by EO Group – owned by former president John Kufuor’s allies Kwame Bauwah Edusei and George Owusu – not only raises the London-listed firm’s stake in the highly prized Jubilee field to almost 26.5%, it also represents what Accra observers call a ‘masterstroke’ to overcome thorny political questions that have blocked previous asset sales, including Kosmos Energy’s effort to sell its 23.49% Jubilee stake toExxonMobil for $4.3bn. EO’s directors are still being investigated in Ghana for alleged corruption (cases having been dropped in the US).

The International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce has found in favour of Woodside Energy in a claim brought by FAR Limited. The tribunal declared that FAR did not have a pre-emption right over Woodside’s 2016 transaction to enter the Rufisque Offshore, Sangomar Offshore and Sangomar Deep Offshore (RSSD) joint venture. Far had challenged Woodside’s $430m purchase of a 35% stake in the RSSD joint venture from ConocoPhillips in 2016, claiming its pre-emptive right was ignored, but the tribunal ruled that the joint operating agreement did not grant pre-emption rights over a transaction involving a sale of shares in one of the member companies.

Eni has announced that an appraisal of the Nene Marine-1 well has established reserves of 600m barrels of oil and 700bcf of gas. The structure, which lies 17km offshore, has considerable additional upside that will be evaluated with further delineation wells, Eni said. The discovery well was drilled in 24 metres of water to a total depth of 3,013 metres and encountered a significant wet gas and light oil accumulation in a Lower Cretaceous pre-salt clastic sequence.

Hyperdynamics Corporation has announced that its Sabu-1 well failed to find commercial hydrocarbons, adding to pressure on the cash-strapped company

Tullow Oil aims to start up the $4bn Tweneboa-Enyenra-Ntomme (TEN) project within weeks, and has come up with a long-term solution to production problems at Jubilee.In a 30 June trading statement, Tullow said TEN was expected to deliver first oil “within the next three to six weeks”. Hook-up and commissioning of the floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel is nearing completion, and oil production is expected to reach the 80,000 b/d capacity around year-end as the facilities complete performance testing and the initial ten wells are brought up to optimum rates.

The international companies that worked so hard to obtain major contracts from the Libyan regime, and their diplomatic backers and bankers, now find themselves confronted with an awkward situation. The unspoken rule of many transactions in recent years has been to find a member of the Qadhafi family – or more usually their representatives – to sponsor a deal through the Jamahiriya (State of the Masses)

BG’s Burullus Gas Company joint venture has given Subsea 7 a contract for the platform extension and tie-in of the first phase of the West Nile Delta development. This will tie back BP’s Taurus and Libra fields to BG’s infrastructure. The award follows a contract in July 2015 for engineering, procurement, installation and pre-commissioning of subsea infrastructure for the development. Nexans was awarded a contract in September to supply 48km of rigid umbilicals.