After years of declines in crude oil production, one of OPEC’s largest African producers, Angola, is finally about to see its production rising in the coming years, with several new projects coming online.
Italy’s oil and gas major Eni said on Friday that it had started up the Agogo oilfield just nine months after its discovery, with the project timeline facilitated by the nearby Floating Production Storage Offloading (FPSO) Ngoma, which lies just 15 kilometers (9 miles) away from the Agogo field.
The Agogo field is estimated to have more than 650 million barrels of oil in place, the Italian major said. Production at the new oilfield has already reached 10,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) and is expected to rise to 20,000 bpd over the next few weeks, Eni said.
Another major European company, France’s Total, has also been very active in Angola in recent months.
In April last year, Total started up production at the Kaombo Sul oil development, adding 115,000 bpd to bring Total’s overall production capacity to 230,000 bpd, equivalent to 15 percent of Angola’s output.
Total is also preparing to drill an ultra deepwater well off the coast of Angola that will be the deepest well in the world.
The pick-up of drilling activity offshore Angola is welcome news for the OPEC producer which has suffered a steady production decline after the oil price crash of 2014 because older fields were maturing while prohibitive costs offshore Angola drove upstream investment away.
Currently, Angola pumps around 1.4 million bpd, according to OPEC’s latest Monthly Oil Market Report (MOMR), which showed the country boosted its production by the most among OPEC producers in December after the Girassol grade returned from maintenance. OPEC’s overall production dropped as additional cuts from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the UAE more than offset Angola’s 125,000-bpd monthly production rise in December.
