NIGERIA - West African Gas P/L Deal.

Chevron Nigeria, which has proven 17 TCF of associated and free gases in its 2.2m acre areas in the country, is leading a project to build a 960 km export pipeline to supply neighbouring Benin, Togo and Ghana with 4.2 MCM/day by 2002. A final agreement on this was signed on Aug. 11, 1999 by the four governments. A parallel agreement was signed on the same day by the NNPC-led JVs of Chevron and Shell's SPDC as they were to supply the gas from their areas of operations. Supplies would rise fivefold during a 20-year period starting from 2002.

The $400m pipeline, by far the largest infrastructure project on which the four countries have collaborated, will be built along the West African coast and will have a marine section. It marks a step towards the integration of four economies which have tended to foster stronger trading links with former colonial powers than with each other. The gas will feed power plants in four countries suffering from energy shortages. Ghana, in particular, has been crippled by recent power failures due to receding water levels in the Volta Lake, which feeds one of the region's largest hydro-electric dams at Akasombo. Until now, Benin and Togo have depended in part on power from Akasombo.

Chevron and Sasol of South Africa are to have a gas-to-liquids (GTL) JV to be built at Chevron's Escravos gas plant with a capacity of 30,000 b/d of synthetic crude oils by 2003. These will be further processed into top quality diesel, naphtha and other liquids for export. Sasol will link its slurry-phase distillate process with Chevron's hydrocracking technology called Isocracking (see Gas Market Trends Nos. 6 & 7).

Elf, a most successful oil explorer in West Africa, now is at war with fellow French oil giant TotalFina over which of the two will buyout the other. On Aug. 12, 1999, TotalFina filed a complaint with a Paris court about the regulatory approval given to an unsolicited "Pac Man" counter-bid made by Elf. That came about three weeks after Elf lodged a similar complaint against TotalFina's all-share offer which sparked the war.

Texaco, operating a smaller JV in Nigeria, in mid-1999 signed an agreement

with Angolan NOC Sonangol to develop an LNG export venture in Angola south of the Congo River. This would complete with the Shell-led NLNG venture.