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Heavily indebted Sasol has opened a data room for its 50% stake in the Rompco pipeline, in a bid to gauge investor interest in a potential sale within the next few months. Even before the impact of coronavirus and the oil price collapse, Sasol had run up $9.8bn of debt, much of it from the Lake Charles chemicals facility in the US. The company is considering various options, including the sale of its 49% stake in Oryx GTL, which runs a gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar, and has hired Bank of America to find a buyer for a minority stake in the Lake Charles complex.

Vanoil contracts BGP for seismic; Newcomer in Karoo Basin; Maersk to decide next year on Chissonga

Gabon has postponed the planned 5 May launch of its tenth licensing round.

President João Lourenço has issued a decree aimed at speeding up the oil and gas licensing process to encourage new investment in the hydrocarbons sector and revitalise exploration to replace depleting reserves. Presidential Decree 86/18, dated 2 April, eliminates the prequalification phase of the licensing process for all new acreage allocated by state petroleum company Sonangol. The legislation also raises the value threshold above which purchases or contracts for services require public tender.

The new federal government, due to be named any day, plans to invite companies that held acreage before the country’s civil war to return and resume exploration. While this may be good news for development, it could cause confusion for acreage licensed by the local authorities in Somaliland and Puntland, writes Thalia Griffiths.

National Oil Corporation (NOC)’s renegotiations of long-term production contracts over the past 18 months have been painful for its partners.

Operator Ophir Energy has announced that the Starfish-1 well on the Offshore Accra Block found water-bearing sands, though the company said it was more interested in the block’s deeper water potential (AE 257/11). The Stena DrillMax drillship drilled the well in 1,490 metres of water to a total depth of 4,348 metres subsea, targeting a prospect described as similar to the Jubilee field.

Serial entrepreneurs Philippe Edmonds and Andrew Groves’ Africa Oilfield Logistics (AOL) has rebranded in an effort to expand its portfolio in East Africa. Renamed Atlas Development and Support Services (ADSS), the oil services support and logistics company aims to offer a one-stop shop solution for international oil companies (IOCs) entering the region’s oil and gas exploration boom. In the changes, Edmonds is no longer a director; neither is he listed as holding shares (holdings over 3% must be shown, according to the rules of London’s Alternative Investment Market).

The upturn in IOC interest in offshore oil and gas potential is creating a bonanza for well-connected local players. Our Windhoek Correspondent digs deeper into local business groups that have tied up with international partners

Kinshasa is keen to promote the hydrocarbons potential of the Cuvette Centrale. But some of the geologists who have studied the largely unexplored region are less sure that a bonanza awaits.

The 118,000km2 Block B straddles eight of South Sudan’s ten states. Located mainly in Jonglei State, it also extends into Warrap, Lakes, Unity, Upper Nile, Eastern Equatoria, Central Equatoria and Western Equatoria.

Canada’s United Hydrocarbon International Corporation has announced two successful wells on its licence area in the Doba Basin as its 2014 drilling campaign gets under way. The Belanga North-1 exploration well was drilled to a total depth of 1,392 metres and encountered three oil-bearing sand intervals; two in the targeted Upper Cretaceous sands with a combined thickness of 16.5 metres, and a previously untested five-metre sand interval in a shallower horizon. The well flowed at 680 b/d on test, and the oil recovered was similar to that in the nearby producing Doba fields.

Essar Exploration & Production Limited Mauritius has filed a claim in the English High Court against the Shoreline Canoverseas Petroleum Development Corporation Limited (ShoreCan) joint venture. Essar is seeking damages of $63m over the joint venture’s failure to come up with the funds for an agreed investment in Essar Exploration and Production Limited Nigeria, which owns a 100% interest in OPL 226 in the central Niger Delta.

Investigations into the business dealings of chairman Mohammed Meziane, three influential vice presidents and other senior executives point to corruption at the highest levels of Sonatrach.

Tokyo Gas Company and Centrica LNG Company have jointly signed heads of agreement (HoA) for the long-term offtake of 2.6m t/yr of liquefied natural gas from Mozambique Area 1 as operator Anadarko Petroleum prepares for a final investment decision (FID) in H1 2019. Anadarko said the agreement represented a significant portion of the sales target it had set to enable FID on the project, which would develop a two-train onshore plant at Afungi in northern Mozambique with capacity of 12.8m t/yr processing gas from the Golfinho/Atum fields.