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Anadarko venture.


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/480969e8-a22a-11de-9caa-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss

Anadarko venture opens new oil coast

By Carola Hoyos, Chief Energy Correspondent
Published: September 15 2009 23:32 | Last updated: September 15 2009 23:32

Anadarko, of the US, with partners Woodside, Repsol, and Tullow, the UK-listed oil company , will reveal as early as Wednesday that they have established a new oil frontier that stretches 1,100km along the coast from Ghana to Sierra Leone.

The announcement will be made off the back of discoveries made by the Venus well Anadarko has been drilling off Sierra Leone, people close to the US company said.

Peter Hitchens, analyst at Panmure Gordon, the financial services group, said before the official announcement: “If Venus comes in, they are into a grand slam.”

That is because Venus-B lies off the shores of Sierra Leone and is at the western edge of a geological system that includes the large discoveries off Ghana’s shores.

Anadarko and Tullow have made a bet on the coastline, snapping up rights to explore the area at low prices when their oil reserves were unknown. Woodside and Repsol, which each hold 25 per cent of the Sierra Leone asset, will also benefit. Anadarko owns a 40 per cent share, while Tullow has 10 per cent.

The Venus well does not prove that the area is full of oil, but it makes it more likely and will sharpen bigger companies’ interests.

The discovery will also be news to the governments of Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone, none of which are big oil producers. But they have watched Ghana leap from being a cocoa exporter with no oil to a country expected to become one of the world’s top-50 oil producers when the Jubilee field begins to pump next year. The Jubilee field is Africa’s largest deep water field and is thought to hold as many as 2bn barrels of oil, while the coastline could increase that.

Stewart Williams, analyst at Wood Mackenzie, the consultants, said the results of the Venus well were important. He said: “If Venus is confirmed as a discovery, it opens up a new play and makes the area valuable.”

A window into the region is Kosmos, the US company backed by the Blackstone Group and Warburg Pincus, which initially discovered the Ghanaian deposits and is up for sale. It could fetch about $4bn (£2.4bn), analysts said, as companies such as Chevron of the US, Royal Dutch Shell and Chinese and Indian companies look through the books.

But in the past weeks the Ghanaian government has delayed the sale by making ever increasing demands – a fate that oil executives say could also befall Ghana’s neighbours as the true value of their offshore reserves becomes clear.