China National Offshore Oil Corp. To Bid Shares at Jubilee Oil Field
October 12th, 2009 | File Under : Companies - Natural Gas - Oil and Gas
China National Offshore Oil Corp.. was in talks with oil companies Ghana, Ghana National Petroleum Corp., to bid for shares in Jubilee oil field. China National Offshore Oil Corp.. will compete with bids from the oil company Exxon Mobil Corp., a $ 4 billion. Wall Street Journal reported, China’s investment plans for mining infrastructure development, mineral exploration and oil exploration projects in Ghana.
Chinese oil companies have announced plans to spend at least $16 billion to gain access to African energy assets since 2006 to meet rising fuel demand at home. Xiao Zongwei, a spokesman at Cnooc Ltd., the unit that handles China National Offshore Oil’s overseas upstream acquisitions, declined today to comment on the Wall Street Journal report.
Kosmos Energy LLC, a U.S. oil explorer backed by Blackstone Group LP and Warburg Pincus LLC, is in talks to sell its stake in Jubilee to Exxon, a person familiar with the negotiations told Bloomberg on Oct. 6. A sale would require approval from Ghana’s government, said two people familiar with the process.
Ghana is set to become West Africa’s newest oil exporter when output begins at Jubilee, discovered in June 2007. The field may hold 1.8 billion barrels of oil and will produce 120,000 barrels of crude a day, according to London-based Tullow Oil Plc, the project operator.
Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, is spending $79 million a day to find new reserves and build oil platforms after output fell in 2008 to the lowest since the 1999 acquisition of Mobil Corp. The company, the biggest U.S. oil producer, said Sept. 9 it may fail to meet its 2009 target for 2 percent output growth.
Chinese Acquisitions
Guinea’s negotiations with the unidentified Chinese fund may be completed by this year, the FT said, citing Guinea Minister of Mines Mohamed Thiam, who added that the talks involve deals worth as much as $7 billion.
Guinea, Hong Kong-based China International Fund and the Angolan state oil company have signed a “memorandum of understanding” to explore for oil, the paper said.
China’s oil consumption doubled in the last decade, rising to 8 million barrels a day last year from 4.2 million barrels in 1998, according to BP Plc’s Statistical Review. The world’s third-largest economy increased net crude oil imports in August to the second highest on record to meet fuel demand.
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