From Joe Shea.....
According to a press release from the company released yesterday afternoon, a shareholders' meeting is set for April 22, 2008, in Houston to hear the latest news and financial reports from ERHC Energy, the "minnow" that has some of the biggest fish inthe world - in the form of ptentially massive oil deposits - on the line and hopes to start landing them next Fall.
The oil deposits in the Gulf of Guineau were awarded to the company in 2005 during the second licensing round of the Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe Joint Development Zone, a region of the Gulf of Guineau that is expected to produce as many as 14 billion barrels of oil for the lucky explorer who strikes it rich there.
Chevron's first test well hit a deposit of roughly 1 billion barrels, according to the Wall Street Journal, but Chevron walked away from the wealth after failing to budge Nigerian officials in their fight to capture rights held by ERHC.
Chevron wanted to develop the entire JDZ field with ExxonMobil, thus saving substantially on forward costs, but could not afford ERHC Energy's buyout price and could not get politicians from either Sao Tome or Nigeria to force the tiny firm to give up its rights, despite help from the U.S. Government and a thinly-veiled attack authored by an oil company ally and released through the Attorney General of Sao Tome and Principe. The tiny island chain is a former Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guineau that shares development rights in the Gulf with Nigerial it also owns its own Exclusive Economic Zone, where ERHC also has rights to explore.
Both the Nigerian and Sao Tomean governments have rejected and disparaged the Sao Tome report, and SEC and FBI officials caught up in Chevron's web spent hundreds of thousands of dollars exploring its spurious charges but never managed to find evidence the company did anything illegal.
That left ExxonMobil in charge of Block 1 with several new, smaller partners, and ERHC, with Addax Petroleum and Chinese oil giant Sinopec in the driver's seat for the Blocks 2, 3 and 4, which are expected to be the most lucrative of all.
