China’s Cosco Shipping has delivered key oil infrastructure to an Angolan field months ahead of schedule, enabling it to begin operations as early as November 2025, according to Africa Oil & Gas Report.
The Agogo floating oil production, storage and offloading unit (FPSO) arrived in Angolan waters in mid-May, having departed one of the Cosco Shipping Heavy Industry shipyards in China in February with a brief stop in Namibia to replenish supplies and swap crew.
It will form a key part of the Agogo Integrated West Hub Project, aimed at developing the Agogo and Ndungu fields and increasing production in Block 15/06 – an area off Angola’s northern coast. Hooking up the Agogo FPSO to the reservoirs will take around six months, with actual field production expected to start as early as November 2025 – much earlier than the expected mid-2026 start date.
With a production capacity of 120,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd), the new platform is expected to increase the maximum production capacity of the Agogo Integrated West Hub Project to 175,000 bopd. If other fields in the country remain largely consistent, Angola should produce over 1.2 million bopd by February 2026.
Production in Block 15/06 began in January 2020, just nine months after oil was discovered. Initial production was quite low, around 10,000 bopd, ramping up slowly to its current capacity of around 55,000 bopd from the original FPSO, known as Ngoma. Estimated reserves for the field range between 450 and 650 million barrels.
[See more: Export data underscores ‘insufficient’ economic diversification in Angola]
Ownership of Block 15/06 is split between Azule Energy (36.84 percent), Angolan national oil company Sonangol (36.84 percent) and Chinese giant Sinopec (26.32 percent), with Azule Energy, an equal joint venture of BP and Eni, serving as operator for the Agogo Integrated West Hub Project.
Singapore-headquartered Yinson Production will operate the Agogo FPSO for Azule Energy under a 15-year firm charter with the option to extend for another five years, allowing the total contract value to reach as much as US$5.3 billion, according to Yinson.
Named in a February ceremony in Shanghai, the Agogo FPSO features a full suite of cutting-edge carbon reduction technologies, including a closed flare system, hydrocarbon blanketing, combined cycle technology as well as the first pilot of a post-combustion carbon capture system of a FPSO. This technology works by separating CO2 from the flue gas generated in combustion, then capturing and compressing the CO2 for transport and geological storage, often in depleted oil and gas reservoirs.
The combination of carbon-reducing technologies onboard is expected to reduce emissions by up to 27 percent, an achievement that Yinson Production CEO Flemming Grønnegaard praised as “a true gamechanger in the industry.”
