CNR puts Baobab and West Espoir on fast-track development schedule

摘要

Cote d'Ivoire will become West Africa's fourth deepwater producer, following sanction last year of the Baobab project. Unlike other operators in the region, CNR International (Cote d'Ivoire) SARL has opted for a fast-track development, with a four-year discovery-to-production time frame. Simultaneously, the company is working to raise production from Espoir, in much shallower water north of Baobab, through the addition of a second wellhead platform. Both projects are due onstream during 2005-06. Thereafter, both sets of facilities could serve increasingly as hubs for tiebacks of smaller finds. CNR entered Cote d'Ivoire in July 2000, when it acquired fellow Canadian independent Ranger Oil. Over the previous two-and-a-half years, Ranger and its partners, state oil company Petroci, Addax, and Tullow, had been re-developing Espoir, in offshore block CI-26. Phillips originally brought the field online in 1982, using a jackup production system. At the outset, it was producing 20,000 b/d, but this rate was halved by the time the field was prematurely abandoned in 1988.