ERHC Chief Operating Officer Peter Ntephe discusses activities underway in the Sao Tome and Principe Exclusive Economic Zone.
I'm Peter Ntephe, Chief Operating Officer, with ERHC Energy.
We still have interest in 3 more blocks in the JDZ. Hopefully, depending on what happens in 2, 3, and 4, we'll probably see the JDA moving on to concretize operations in those blocks as well. That's within their power. And then we're looking, of course, in the near term, at the EEZ... at the EEZ where we have substantial interests. Perhaps, in certain ways, even more than the JDZ... because here we have two entire blocks, a hundred percent, signature bonus free. So those are quite substantial, and of course the two more blocks where we'll have 15% working interests, and in which we'll pay signature bonuses. Sao Tome and Principe, we've had very good relations with them. We look forward to that continuing. We had a management delegation go down there in summer, and we met with several officials of the government. We made, um, some contributions, corporate official responsibility, and we look at our relationship continuing well into the future.We look at Sao Tome and Principe at somewhere where ERHC has a special corporate bond with. That was the beginning of this journey that we're on and we've made made quite remarkable progress on, and we really, really do look forward to working with the government and people of Sao Tome and Principe to take our mutual interests to the next level.
The procedure as we know it, as we have been informed so far, is that the enabling law, which will guide the process, is being finalized. That enabling law, of course, takes cognisance of ERHC interests, and once that is out they will announce a time table, and they will invite the parties with preferential rights, including ERHC, to make their picks. Preparations are underway on our part. They have been setting up that data room. As we understand it arrangements are being finalized and we expect that a very highly specialized technical team, under the leadership of our Vice President Technical, Dan Gralla, will visit that data room within the coming weeks, and we'll be able to assess the blocks that we would like to make our preferential picks over, and of course, at that time we shall as usual, inform our shareholders appropriately that this is what ERHC intends to do, and this is the direction in which we are going. Our relationship with Sao Tome and Principe goes back a long way. We were practically the pioneers in Sao Tome and Principe, along with one or two other parties. So we'd like to think that our preferential rights will override most, if not all, subject of course to the sovereign right of that nation, which ERHC has always respected. It does give us an indication. It does give us an advantage, of being in the region, but, um, again, you can never really predict, you know, it depends on geology and and as they say, they Gods of oil can be funny. So, um, we do have an advantage, definitely. Yes, we do have an advantage from having been there already. We do have an advantage, but um, we'll look... we'll look and see how the EEZ progresses, as a separate zone entirely, even if it's contiguous with the Joint Development Zone. We'll look at that as a separate asset entirely.
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