The China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) will be sending a delegation led by its chairman, Liu Yongjie, to Angola for talks on oil exploration in the Southern African country.
Angola left OPEC back in December over quota disputes. During the recent state visit to Beijing by Angolan President João Lourenço, officials expressed a desire to strengthen energy relations with China, which is both a key oil export market and Angola’s largest single creditor.
Lourenço is eager to revamp his country’s energy sector, holding multiple block auctions over the past five years and boosting refining capacity in an effort to turn around Angola’s declining oil production.
[See more: CNOOC’s deep-water oilfield project begins production in Brazil]
According to Angolan oil and gas minister Diamantino Azevedo, the talks with CNOOC will centre on Block 24 and other oil exploration opportunities. Block 24 is part of the Kwanza Basin, a 300-km wide basin in western-central Angola that extends from land into deep-water deposits offshore.
While the complex geology and deep pre-salt reserves that characterise the basin would deter many companies, CNOOC has extensive experience with both in Brazil. In the Mero Field, part of the Santos Basin off the coast of Brazil, CNOOC is extracting pre-salt reserves beneath 1,400 to 2,400 metres of water, with wells extending as much as 6,000 metres.
Just this month, the company’s third floating production, storage and offloading unit set sail for Brazil. The Santos Basin is more than twice the width of its Angolan counterpart and home to the three largest oil fields in Brazil.
