EXCLUSIVE:

Описание: Canadian Overseas Petroleum Ltd work in offshore Nigeria and Mozambique. #COPL are at the later stages of organising a finance package to begin a development project on OPL226 offshore Nigeria which contains substantial amounts of hydrocarbon.

London South East interviewed COPL President and CEO Arthur Millholland who told us "a service provider may be announced within a month", one of the key steps to be taken before the project begins.

The OPL226 block surrounds a Schlumberger project with $700M worth of finance. OPL226 has had 5 previous wells drilled which have all discovered oil or gas. The first new well to be drilled is horizontal and has 6-10,000 bpd potential. "This is development work not exploration".

"Its not hard to find oil in Nigeria" said Arthur, "the issue is being able to operate there around what we would call the political risk."

"For years now Nigeria has had an indigenousisation policy, creating a local oil service sector, which I think is great. We have a Nigerian joint venture partner and we own the project 50/50. This gives us considerable tax and regulatory advantages over foreign owned projects."

"Its taken five years to get to this point, now we are going to have newsflow coming, the first thing to expect is a service provider agreement, then to get a sign-off agreement from NPCC on our development plan," said the CEO.